Often described as a "ghost town" and a failed utopia envisioned by Henry Ford, the Amazonian company town founded in 1928 is neither truly utopian nor abandoned. It remains a place shaped by the lives, memories, and everyday rhythms of its residents. The ghosts that linger here are not myths but enduring historical forces—Ford, capitalism, and extractivism. By confronting the blind spots of this history, the narrative reveals how past and present remain deeply entangled, and how these spectral legacies continue to shape the town and the communities that inhabit it.

Fordlândia, in the film’s original title, was the name of a settlement built by Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford in the Brazilian Amazon to secure a stable supply of rubber for automobile production. Ford acquired vast tracts of what he regarded as an “empty” jungle and attempted to build a company town there. Yet ignorance of the Amazonian ecosystem and local cultures, along with disease, pests, and conflicts over labor practices, led the project to failure, leaving behind what has often been remembered as a ghost town.
Rather than reducing the place to a story of “Ford’s failure,” however, the film approaches it as a living space. Neither utopia nor ghost town, Fordlândia is revisited as a place still filled with life. The true ghost is not the ruin itself, but the historical and capitalist desires embodied by Fordism and extractivism. The film listens for memories obscured by myth: Indigenous time before Ford, the workers who built the city and disappeared, and the migrant and Indigenous communities who continue to live there. Before collapsed buildings and the traces left behind, it brings us to a halt and asks us to hear them speak. A leading Portuguese filmmaker of archival essays, Susana de Sousa Dias turns the archive into a meditation on place, memory, power, and desire. Here, archival material is not dead evidence of the past but a question directed at the present—and a remnant of violence that still endures.

• ProducerAnsgar SCHAEFER
• Screenplay Susana de SOUSA DIAS
• Cinematography Susana de SOUSA DIAS
• Edit Susana de SOUSA DIAS, Mário ESPADA
• Sound Ansgar SCHAEFER, Tiago MATOS

Portugal Film - Portuguese Film Agency | Luís LEMOS | pf@portugalfilm.org