Short Film, 12:47 minutes

Credits, rights, and attribution: Vera Sales Editing (credits): Mischa Dols

Filmmaker’s Note:

This short film is a composite of archival, amateur, and ethnographic videos, images, and sounds capturing both dead and living rats gathered over nine months of fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 

The human presence, technology, camera, recorder, environment, music, and Pentecostal worship are each co-creators of what you will see and hear in this film. In its diffractive reality, images do not merely represent rats; they layer, leak, and interfere with one another, unsettling how we perceive other-than-human animals.

Here, you will be caught in the echoes of multispecies cohabitation. I invite you to listen, witness, and recognise the unseen entanglements that shape urban life in a city marked by deep social and spatial inequalities.

Filmmaker’s Bio:

Vera is a researcher of Urban Geography at the University of Amsterdam. With a foundation in anthropology and urban studies, she is pursuing a PhD focused on human, rats and infrastructure relationships of urban inequalities in Rio de Janeiro.

Banner Image Credits: Still from Vera Sales’ film

Editing Credits: Mischa Dols