Plot Summary:A MACHINE TO LIVE IN is a documentary feature about cosmic dreams and mystical architecture at the heart of Brazil's remote wilderness. Through an emergent polyphonic text composed of four personalities, the film moves from the hyper-designed, space-age city of Brasília to the vast and flourishing landscape of UFO cults, spiritist temples, and utopian outposts. Brasília, a sixties-era megaproject, is a crumbling monument to an obsessively rational dream of state power. Lined with massive concrete domes, pyramids, and geometric "superblocks," the city resembles a highly-planned moonpad in some outdated sci-fi vision of the future. A future where an ultra-rational urban design produces the ultra-rational citizen, living harmoniously in machine-like order. Yet the people who arrived to witness this utopian project in the hinterlands were themselves possessed by their own powerful visions of the future. Over the decades that followed, this region of Brazil became home to the densest ...
Erected in 1,000 days under the supervi- sion of Oscar Niemeyer between 1956 and 1960, Brasilia is a “cosmo-futurist” utopia become reality. Over encounters, writings (by Clarice Lispector, among others) and archives, Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke stage an ambitious documentary cosmology on the genesis and potential futures of this absolutely unique city.