Grasshopper Film will release Dry Ground Burning (Mato Seco em Chamas) from the directorial duo of Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós.

Winner of the Grand Prize at Cinéma du Réel and the Cinema Tropical Award for Best Latin American Film of the Year, as well as an official selection at numerous film festivals including Berlinale, New York, Toronto, Jeonju, and Vienna, the explosive Brazilian docufiction hybrid will have its North American theatrical release starting Friday, April 14 at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, on Friday, April 21 the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York City, to be followed by theaters across the country.

Dry Ground Burning follows a fearsome outlaw Chitara in Sol Nascente, Brazil, who leads an all-female gang that siphons and steals precious oil from the authoritarian, militarized government. Her sister, Léa, recently released from prison, is brought into the criminal enterprise. Acting as a collective, they become the gasolineiras – petrol pirates who tap into an underground crude oil pipeline, assemble the tools to refine it into gasoline, and then sell it to the motorcycle riders of the favela.

Owning the means of production, the gasolineras become gasoline kingpins, serving their community; in one scene, they blast trap music out of a truck, rapping song lyrics on the microphones, the motorcycle riders behind them, as they promote their newly-formed “Prison People Party,” an abolitionist political group running against the Bolsonaro-backed political candidate up for re-election.

But is it all fiction, a fantasy? Pimenta and Queirós playfully keep the lines blurred between what is real and what is dramatized in this documentary-fiction hybrid. What starts as a gangster epic, with elements of sci-fi—something like a Brazilian feminist rendition of Mad Max-turns into a documentary with dramatized elements, or vice versa.

Working together as directors for the first time, Queirós and Pimenta are no strangers to an unconventional approach to both documentary and narrative. Their first collaboration was on Queirós’s Once There Was Brasilia (2017) – a film that followed an intergalactic agent who is assigned on a mission to travel to Earth and assassinate the Brazilian president – on which Pimenta served as cinematographer.

Watch official trailer for Dry Ground Burning.