Léo Bittencourt | Vagalumes (Fireflies) / 2021

a stroll through the park late at night

by Douglas Messerli

 

Léo Bittencourt and Ricardo Pretti (screenwriters), Léo Bittencourt (director) Vagalumes (Fireflies) / 2021 [19 minutes]

 

Brazilian director Léo Bittencourt’s 2021 cinematic work Fireflies is not so much a traditional movie as it is a night tour of a world that most of the citizens of Rio de Janeiro never encounter, yet by day know well as the Parque do Flamengo, Roberto Burle Marx’s extravagant public park of fauna and flora, built, as Bittencourt himself describes it as “one of the major public works to renovate the city center of Rio.” “In this process of ‘modernization,’” he continues, “countless poor families were removed to the periphery and important hills were demolished.”

    By choosing to shoot at night, however, Bittencourt and his crew featured not “actors” as much as a different population, marginalized and forgotten, who seek out the park as a refuge at night. Among the “cast” were Daniel Dos Santos de Andrade, Elisa Lucinda, Gabriel Fernando de Castro, Gleiton Matheus Bonfante, Lino Besser, Lourival Júnior, Niana Machado, Paulo Guidelly, Rafael Medina, Wallace Lino, some homeless and simply washing themselves, some involved in the candomblé folk religion, one a cat woman who feeds the park’s dozens of hidden strays, and most gay cruisers who seek out the park for companionship and sex.

     Without judging or even fully explaining their actions, Bittencourt categorizes them as “fireflies” “that shine in the dark of the Aterro.” Bittencourt summarizes, “These characters, who despite being the shadow of the modernist ideal that conceived and built the park, makes this space a place for experiencing other forms of sociability, struggle, and pleasure.”

     Unlike so very many films that have featured gay park cruisers, here there is little interest in voyeuristic images of sex. Although we certainly witness some men engaged in what appear to be sexual activities, we observe far more just wandering, appearing for moments in one place and another, before totally disappearing. The beauty is their movement, the trace of their existences, the light that shines in their seconds of sharing, pleasure, or simple existence.

    Bittencourt argues that what was created as an idealized space for the daytime city dwellers, under his camera becomes “A space that only exists through cinema. Vagalumes narrates an evening stroll which begins with a sci-fi atmosphere and builds a sensory experience among plants, people, animals and architecture that ends with the entire park cumming.”

 

Los Angeles, April 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).