Ilha Das Flores

[It’s an] an intriguing commentary on humanity disguised into a story about a tomato, from it being grown to being thrown in the landfill. There is a lot of beautiful (yet devastating) footage (Source: regardemylasheskgm 2005 np link).

It starts very innocent, but suddently takes a gut wrenching turn (Source: BrazilianHuevolution 2024 np link).

A tomato is planted, harvested and sold at a supermarket, but it rots and ends up in the trash. Ends? No. ISLAND OF FLOWERS follows it up until its real end, among animals, trash, women and children. And the difference between tomatoes, pigs and human beings becomes clear (Source: Anon 2010 np link).

The tomato planted by Mr Suzuki, exchanged for money with the supermarket, exchanged for money that Mrs Anete exchanged for perfumes extracted from flowers, refused for the pork sauce, thrown to the trash, and rejected as food for pigs, is now available for the human beings of the Ilha das Flores (Source: Trujillo 2022, p.147).

Beginning at Mr Suzuki’s tomato field, the tomato is then sold to a supermarket, where it is acquired by Mrs Anete, a perfume saleswoman, together with some pork. Each exchange requires the presence of money, which is, together with the tomato, the constant element in the story. Mrs Anete intends to prepare a tomato sauce for the pork, but, having considered one of Mr Suzuki’s tomatoes inadequate, she throws it in the garbage. Together with the rest of the garbage, the tomato is taken to Isle of Flowers (Ilha das Flores), Porto Alegre’s landfill. There, the organic material considered adequate is selected as food for pigs. The rest, which is considered inadequate for the pigs, is given to poor women and children to eat (Source: Anon nda np link).

In its depiction of a tomato’s journey from Japanese-run plantation to supermarket to middle-class ‘Roman Catholic’ kitchen to garbage-can to the ominous Brazilian island of the film’s title, Isle of Flowers allows the spectator to glimpse a trajectory that neatly delineates the various social fields imbricated in the consumerist landscape of the last century, from the highest corporate echelons to the poverty-stricken bottom-feeders (Source: Diffrient 2007 np link).

The film follows the vector of a tomato that is thrown out by a fictional Brazilian perfume seller, Mrs. Anete. …. The parts of waste management are disassembled and reassembled from the lens of a tomato. We learn, through the course of the cartoonish documentary, of how the tomato is picked, who picks it, where it is sold, how money is exchanged for vegetables, where the rotten tomato travels to, and how it is sorted through after it reaches the landfill. Upon arriving at the dump, the tomato is sorted out by the owner of a pig. Children of a shantytown near the dump are left to sort through whatever is deemed unfit for pigs, a pathetic remainder of human and animal consumption. The contrast between settings of consumption is intentionally stark. The perfume seller, Mrs Anete, flashes a photogenic smile across her face, joined by shots of both her wedding pictures and her middle class family gathered around the dinner table. They eat, we are told, sauce from the tomatoes that were fit for eating. The primary effort by director Jorge Furtado is to offer through bitter irony (there are no flowers on the island of flowers, we are reminded) a picture of the inhumanity of consumption and extreme class inequality. In order to do this, the supposed private act of waste making is made an unavoidably public issue (Source: Gambetta 2009 p.28-30 link).

Ilha das Flores, or Island of Flowers, is an island in a lake in Brazil which serves as a garbage dump for the nearby city of Porto Alegre. Each day hired workers sort the tons of garbage into organic and inorganic categories. The organic garbage consists of rotting fruit and vegetables and paper. This is then dumped into fenced areas where more hired hands separate out what is still considered of adequate quality to be consumed by the many pigs which are also kept on the island. Once this has been removed the hoards of poor and hungry women and children who have been waiting patiently are allowed into the fenced areas for five minutes to try to salvage what they can to eat out of what is left of the garbage. Needless to say, the mounds of garbage have been subject from the beginning to all kinds of contamination. The film’s matter of fact, even humorous narration, enlivened with animation, belies the appalling subject matter. A trenchant commentary on contemporary moral values (Source: NYU nd np link).

[When the film gets to the garbage dump, the narrator] states that woman and children are humans with opposing thumbs and no money. In the background we see indigenous women and children searching through the scraps that wasn’t good enough for the pigs and taking the items out the perimeter. The scene cuts to a group of indigenous people holding up their index fingers and thumbs. Throughout the film, the narrator refers to the idea that humans have opposable thumbs with highly developed brains. The families of indigenous people acting out that definition shows that they are indeed human, however they are not treated as such (Source: Saffold & Geller 2016 p.6 link).

Furtado efficiently presents a very complex essay in 13 minutes on the politics of food, class divisions, freedom and human behavior using a fast-moving collage of images and equally rapid satirical narration (Source: Anon 2006 p17).

[The film] tracks the path of a tomato … with the help of a monotone voiceover and a collection of bizarre images. While a very humorous film, the message it delivers about how human beings treat each other is anything but such. … A constant and verbose offnarrator guides the viewer through the life of a tomato (Source: Anon nda np link).

[T]the choice of names and definitions seems random at first … Some … are accompanied by powerful archival images. For example, the words ‘telencephalon’ and ‘opposable thumb’ are said to help humans come up with ‘improvements for our planet’, while accompanied by the image of a mushroom cloud from what seems to be a nuclear explosion: the word ‘Jews’ is juxtaposed to images of the Holocaust and extermination camps; and the word ‘water’ is linked to images of the brackinsh waters of the Island of Flowers (Source: Trujillo 2022, p.147).

The narator explains that it was humans with a ‘highly developed telencephalon and opposable thumbs’ that made possible such a situation on the island (Source: Trujillo 2022, p.144).

At the conclusion … a voiceover plaintively yet matter-of-factly intones, ‘Freedom is a word the human dream feeds on, that no one can explain or fail to understand.’ These words, muttered during the film’s slow-motion crescendo, are accompanied by images of gaunt-framed gleaners and trash-pickers of all ages wading through a fly-infested wastescape – a rubbish heap piled high with rotting food and empty containers. Layered atop these images is the sound of an electric guitar that screeches and wails like an echo of some past colonial violence – a distant signifier perhaps of the victimization and human-rights violations that persist in various parts of the world despite the humanitarian tide of this postcolonial era. Besides encapsulating the many ideas percolating throughout Isle of Flowers, the last few words of the film ironically underscore the hardscrabble realities faced by men, women and children who envisage a life far removed from the terrestrial stink of the pigsty. The film, which tracks the life of a ‘hand-me-down’ tomato, culminates with this bleak, bottom-rung image. As what would appear to be the final resting place of the tomato in its culinary pilgrimage, the trash site represents an historical terminus – a kind of neo-colonial contact zone between marginalized people (past and present) and their oppressors. The latter group is symbolized by a ‘benevolent’ landowner who allots ten minutes each day for the island’s malnourished masses to scavenge through his fenced-in property for tomatoes not fit for pigs to eat (Source: Diffrient 2007 np link).

Ilha das Flores is a parable of poverty in Brazil. This short film presents the stark realities of the haves and the have-nots. Director Jorge Furtado lures the viewer into a seemingly innocent chain of logic with a powerful conclusion (Source: Anon ndc np link).

A powerful, unpredictable piece on man’s inhumanity to man … A pungent social satire, the visual poem reads like a comic political essay written by James Joyce in a mock documentary style … A remarkably unconventional use of media as parable (Choice Magazine cited in Anon ndb np link).

[This] is a political film that makes you laugh with sarcasm from beginning to end. In only 13 minutes, it says everything one needs to know about who is responsible for the massacre of the planet Earth, starting from trash and one tomato (Silvestri 1991 np cited in Anon ndb np link).

The critique of unbridled consumerism and commodity fetishism [is] explicit in Furtado’s thickly condensed fifteen-minute epic (Source: Diffrient 2007 np link).

This film depicts, in an indirect but still quite powerful manner, key principles in the Marxist / critical perspective. In particular, it illustrates the logic of capitalism, a logic that reduces some human beings (without money) to a position lower than pigs (Source: Lim 2009 np link).

If there is one out there who already read the ‘Das Kapital’ of Marx, this film might look like well mastered image of that great book. Apart from this, you can feel the genius in this film’s montage. A real gem for short film category. Anything, you just touch, buy, eat, drink or listen to is in fact not just itself. In this case, Jorge Furtado tells us what a single tomato hides in itself (Source: chimera_s 2006 np link).

Ilha das Flores is a harsh and provocative story that motivates us to review our way of living and our behavior in favor of a more fair and sustainable common lifestyle. The social critical lens allows audiences to take a conscious and responsible approach to their actions (Source: @lucinetecosta9946 2024, np link).

Isle of Flowers, like a caffeine-jolted version of a Chris Marker visual essay, immediately sinks its rhetorical hooks into the audience through the filmmaker’s bricolage tactics. By stitching together a panoply of images associated with throwaway culture, and by superimposing them atop religious and historical iconography, Furtado critically tweaks our almost sacrosanct devotion to consumer goods with a pixilated intensity rarely achieved in cinema. Newspaper advertisements, sunglasses, Coke insignias and binoculars all junk the frame with a funkiness associated with ‘garbology’ – an art-historical neologism alluded to in film scholar Robert Stam’s illuminating essay, ‘Hybridity and the Aesthetics of Garbage: The Case of Brazilian Cinema.’ In his discussion of Isle of Flowers, Stam states that the film’s recuperative tactics bring to mind the ways in which the detritus and flotsam of the Western world are transmogrified into art within Afro-diasporic contexts – a project of recycling and re-aestheticizing that imparts significance onto something once deemed worthless. The film foregrounds how garbage ‘looks bad’ to the eyes of the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie. The bruised tomato at the heart of the film is an eyesore. It emits an offensive odor. Trash attacks the senses. Hence the commodification of flower-scented perfume, which Mrs. Anecci – one of the film’s half-dozen characters – sells door-to-door to earn money with which to buy fresher fruits and vegetables. Mobilizing its own garbage-like, collage-hodgepodge aesthetic, the film playfully blends Monty Pythonesque animation, archival film footage, pedagogical slide-show presentations and a voice-of-God commentary (the speaker of which, like an aural alumnus from the BBC cult series Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, commands perfect Brit-speak elocution while conveying surreally unpredictable wordplay). The rhetorical disposition of the film shifts from flippancy to absolute seriousness. The narrator’s hilarious tautology (delivering absurdist lines such as ‘Mr. Suzuki is Japanese, and therefore a human being,’ and ‘Money was created in the seventh-century before Christ, Christ was a Jew, and Jews are human beings’) imitates the arbitrary causality of contiguous elements and leads us into a laughter-trap that snaps shut when immediately cut to images of the Holocaust and Hiroshima’s mushrooming A-bomb (rendering garbage piles of human bodies) – cynically referred to as great human endeavors springing out of our ‘highly developed telencephalons.’ As serious as these themes are, however, the film steers clear of sledgehammered didactics and self-righteous polemics; and, in the final analysis, functions not only as a treatise on social injustices but also as a parable about the human condition – one that, in a zap of solar perplexity, simultaneously blinds and enlightens us to the fact of an organic or material object’s finitude. Fluctuating between two ontological poles, that of the disposable and that of the recyclable, the hand-me-down – whether a tomato or a human being – eventually either perishes or fades away in the harsh light of oblivion (Source: Diffrient 2007 np link).

[This] is a highly metafictional film that explores the ambivalence of the documentary genre. In doing so, the film varies between fiction and documentary, drama and history, essay and fait divers , comedy and tragedy (Source: Ginway & Suppia 2012 p.206).

Furtado’s edited collage is structured as a social lexicon or glossary, or better, a surrealist enumeration of words such as ‘pigs,’ ‘money,’ and ‘human beings.’ The definitions are interconnected and multi-chronotopic; they lead out into multiple historical frames and historical situations. In order to follow the trajectory of the tomato, we need to know the origin of money: ‘Money was created in the seventh century before Christ. Christ was a Jew, and Jews are human beings.’ As the audience is still laughing from this abrupt transition, the film cuts directly to the photographic residue of the Holocaust, where Jews, garbage-like, are thrown into death-camp piles. (The Nazis, we are reminded, had their own morbid forms of recycling.) Throughout, the film moves back and forth between minimalist definitions of the human to the lofty ideal of freedom evoked by the film’s final citation: ‘Freedom is a word the human dream feeds on, that no one can explain or fail to understand’ (Source: Stam 1998 np link).

This film is a radical example of how fiction (narrative) and non fiction (reference to reality) can mix within a documentary. In the scene, the director shows the image of one of the main ‘characters’ in the movie, – a tomato -, but also uses a narrative discourse to describe its activity as a commodity. One scene is an interior in which the director’s point of view shows a selection of elements: several tomatoes in a bag, a woman and a trash basket. Furtado’s discourse, or his order of these selected elements, is as follows: the woman takes one of these tomatoes, smells it and expresses her rejection through a facial gesture. The woman throws the tomato in the trash. The next shot is an image of four conventional symbols making the word LIXO, which in Portuguese means ‘trash.’ This simple action is an example of the creative use of narration (from a particular point of view and with a selected and an ordered structure) to provide a more complete representation of that reality (tomato). Now the viewer, through her catalytic participation, infers that the discarded tomato is different from the rest of the group because of its unpleasant odor; also, the viewer can identify the importance of the word LIXO and its meaning in the representation of that tomato. Nevertheless, the director is in fact not interested in just showing the plain reality of that tomato, but in using it as a metaphor to explore a social reality of the Brazilian society. Furtado follows the trajectory of that ‘tomato’ to take us to a subworld very present in today’s Latin America. The director plays a role as an intermediary between a simple reality that demands to be observed and another more complex reality that is latent, observed and is susceptible to be changed (Source: Mendoza 2010 p.28-9 link).

With originality and creative vigor, it dismantles the patronizing discourse which is the basis of most Brazilian documentaries. (…) an ingenious narrative building in a crescendo that takes your breath away. (…) ISLAND OF FLOWERS is the result of a very special alchemy, where everything works. It is full of humor, but it never turns tragedy (…) into a laughing matter. Jorge Furtado has invented the cruelty documentary (Source: do Rosário Caetano in Anon ndb np link).

[This] post-modern assemblage of images … did not have any ‘production costs’ (Source: Trujillo 2022, p.141).

It has a language that for the time was very innovative, speed, plans, relationship between content, today [is] much more popularized, especially by the internet. The hypertext, that little word you click and go to another text, several different image sources. That is already more naturalized. … When we made the film in 1989, I remember calling two different photographers and asked them not to talk, not combining anything, so that the language was very fragmented, very different from one plan to the other. When a word appears in the short, a picture appears. For example, if it is said ‘money’, a note appears. It’s like when we’re looking for something on Google today. If you type ‘money, some images appear (Source: Furtado in Anon 2019 np link).

The film’s examination of the life and death of a tomato is clearly a critique of neoliberalist policies, the predominant initiative of the period that claimed that the principle of the free market would resolve political divisions and help Latin America to become more globally competitive (Source: Ginway & Suppia 2012, p.207).

Ilha das Flores appeared during a key moment of the democratization period in Brazil, the year in which the ‘reinstation of direct popular election’ took place with the appointment of President Fernando Collor de Melo … It was also a turbulent economic moment in the country, after the failure of the new currency under the Cruzado Plan and the subsequent inflation that surpassed 1,000 per cent from 1986 to 1989 … The debt crisis that ensued widened the gap between the rich and poor, placing Brazil as one of the nations in South America with the most inequality. By 1990, approximately 30 per cent of the population had an ‘income inadequate to buy sufficient food’ … One of the most serious environmental disasters had also occurred only a few years before the film appeared, an accident that took place in the city of Goiânia and involved the improper disposal of radioactive material. As the 1988 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency states, ‘the accident in Goiânia was one of the most serious radiological accidents to havd occurred to date’ … The radioactive contamination of Goiânia affected the way Brazilians imagined this new future in which the promises of democracy, nuclear energy and capitalism seemed to only exacerbate the social inequality of the country. In a recent interview … Furtado emphasises that his short film continues to be relevant thirty tears later precisely because its core message is a critique of the social injustice that still pervades Brazil (Source: Trujillo 2022 p.132).

Towards the end of Ilha das Flores, a quick reference is made to a particular word, that of ‘caesium’. … The reference to caesium … is accompanies by an image of a child covering his face with what looks like white powder, immediately followed by an image of that same child in a body bag with radioactive signs. On 13 September 1987, several people in Goiânia were contaninated with the radioactive isotope of caesium – caesium-137 (Source: Trujillo 2022 p.139).

Film critics Robert Stam, João Luiz Vieira, and Ismail Xavier have written that by linking the pork dish, the pig living at the garbage dump, and the tomato, the film illustrates how the worlds of the haves and have-nots operate ‘within a web of global rationality’ (Source: Ginway & Suppia 2012, p.207).

In Isle of Flowers , the technique of cognitive estrangement, based on rational premises, effectively dismantles the discourse of neoliberalism, with its concepts of ‘freedom’ and ‘free-market.’ Thus, while those with the power of exchange have multiple and varied choices, those without it, the women and children in the dump – despite their classification as humans or ‘bipeds with a developed telencephalon and opposable thumbs’ – like the middle-class characters of Mr. Suzuki and Dona Anete – are the discarded detritus of society. Even though Isle of Flowers is not an [Science Fiction] film per se, it demonstrates an SF sensibility. Furtado, by adopting an SF discursive strategy, so to speak, combines scientific knowledge and film techniques in such a way that he alienates us from our own familiar planet, society, and settings. Thus, we are transported to an alien world, which is, at the same time, the one we live in (Source: Ginway & Suppia 2012, p.207).

[Q:] The short is available on various platforms and websites on the internet. How do you see this dissemination and the fact that it continues to be seen in the classroom? … [A:] The film has subtitles and narration, for example, in several languages on the internet. And I don’t even know who did or what’s [it’s] saying exactly (Source: Furtado in Anon 2019 np link).

Postmodern and materialist in its approach to the indexical quality of images, the documentary jars viewers’ expecations by establishing an apparently fragmented ecology of images and random choice of words defined by the narrator in a hypertextual play that emphasizes its artificial framing. Yet this performance gradually leads the viewer to make connections between what seemed distant and disconnected, creating a mesh of relations that provocatively makes the journey of a tomato from the field to the landfill in the Ilha das Flores, a path that exposes all entities complicit in the social and environmental injustices taking place there (Source: Trujilllo 2022, p.148).

[T]oday maybe we could make the movie almost with random images. Every time you watched the documentary, the images were different. You can make a movie like this, every different every time you see it. I think that would be an interesting novelty (Source: Furtado in Anon 2019 np link).

The human disaster of poverty is brilliantly depicted here. Anyone who wishes to stimulate an exploration of our human condition – of work and poverty, of despair and hunger, and of moral challenge – will find this an extraordinarily powerful and important video (Source: Hospital & Community Psychiatry in Anon ndb np link).

Funny at first, demolishing in the end. When I saw this movie for the first time I spent the first minutes laughing: the editing is fast paced and the voice over explains one after another different concepts that apparently are barely connected. But in the end all grows into a perfectly mounted description of the economical and political aberrations of our times, all in less than 30 minutes (Source: Trufó 2000 np link).

It’s about capitalism, told through the story of a tomato. But, thinking back on it, it was much more than just that tomato, that went into the making of the family’s dinner, which was bought with money, which was acquired through the mother’s perfume sales, which is an alcohol-based topical fragrance oil. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, this is how the film is paced. It is the very reason the word ‘Tangential’ was created. Furtado is so crafty at taking you to places you never think you’ll go; from painfully hilarious irony (the monty python-esque first 5 minutes), to head-battering shock (the history of ‘the second’); just by mentioning a single word, you could travel from a dollar bill to a pile of emaciated bodies, within a matter of seconds. And none of the connections are far-fetched. His story is based on the theory of six degrees of separation, and how he arrives at those final, latent images of haunting truth is a trip that must be taken (Source: Delaney 2001 np link).

Although the film is said to have a Monty Python–like sensibility, its technique is also reminiscent of Darko Suvin’s cognitive estrangement in that it makes us see our own society and its underlying assumptions in a new way. Thus, the film’s voiceover narrator expresses no more interest in the women and children collecting food scraps in the garbage dump other than their classification as bipeds, which differentiates them from quadrupeds such as pigs. In the film’s ‘narrative,’ a parody of the fantastic tale, the tomato, a protagonist of sorts, takes on the hero’s quest to discover a magical island. In its leading role, the tomato ties together the human characters and their situations, yet produces the dissonance of cognitive estrangement, since it defamiliarizes us from everyday realities through reason (Source: Ginway & Suppia 2012, p.206).

In my opinion, this documentary was great for showing us the differences between social classes and how for capitalism something or someone who does not have money or generates money unfortunately becomes useless in the eyes of this system, which consequently does not give the right to almost nothing to these people. This shows us how we could adopt more sustainable living measures to improve the living conditions of these people and even ourselves, and how this waste production system greatly affects the existence of communities that live in places where the waste produced is discarded. by the population of cities (Source: @maii_muniz 2024 np link).

Ilha das Flores presents toxicity as a trans-corporeal connection that binds the consumption of commodities with the ‘diseases’ to which people on the island are exposed to. A seemingly benign product such as a tomato may become part of a mesh of toxicity in the process of being grown, sold and discarded. … Mr Suzuki and Mrs Anete are unknowingly collaborating in the toxicity of the human and nonhuman bodies inhabiting the island. The narrator … suggests as much when he explains that what Mrs Anete considers as unsuitable to feed her family – because of the possible diseases it might carry – later becomes the food that the poor women and children will eat. Toxic substances are never really disposed of, for they always find a way back in (Source: Trujillo 2022, p.139-140).

This film is sad, and sensational (Source: @GashBuss 2024 np link).

Very good, intelligent and deep as a punch in the stomach (Source: @nacaotutumbaie3559 2024 np link).

Wonderful and sad, because I see no way out (Source: @elzamamaterra1723 2024 np link).

It’s sad to live in a world where money is worth more than lives, and any initiative to want to change that and make things a little more fair is shot down by the same person who is in the same situation, but denies themselves that they are not. Damn capitalism and the bourgeoisie who enslave us (Source: @GuilhermeMamute 2025 np link).

Brazilian filmmaker Jorge Furtado makes a point in his appalling and beautifully disheartening documentary . . . With sincere irony, Furtado shows freedom is the problem of many people in a world in which only money and property count. When people don’t have money or property, how can they survive? Their problem seems to be they don’t have an owner. Just as dogs, or pigs, they wouldn’t die of hunger, nor live a life of the worst humiliation if they had somebody to provide them (Source: Bigatti 2008 np link).

Wow, different! it was entertaining and humourous, but by the end I just felt like  being sick. It is so hard for me to understand the reality of people who have to sift  through garbage to find food … that is just so far from the comfortable lifestyles we  live in (Source: Redroom Studios 2008 np link).

It was made in 1989 but is still very relevant … funny and hard hitting social commentary at the same time (Source: shapeshift 2008 np link).

A brazilian classic. Used to be shown to kids in Brazilian schools during the 90s. I watched it for the first time at 9 years old (Source: @aakds 2024 np link).

Most of brazilian children watched this documentary at school. Many, myself included, remember it as a ‘collective trauma’. I remember like it was yesterday when the teacher brought an old television, turned the lights off and played it to us without saying a single word (Source: BrazilianHuevolution 2024 np link).

I remember it very well, I actually watched it the first time at school. And we analyzed the short. I never forgot [it] again (Source: @AndersonPedron 2024 np link).

I still use the term ‘oppo[sable] thumb and developed brain’ to refer to some hahaha (Source: @drmarcootavio-medicodermat501 2024 np link).

I was 14 years old when the Geography teacher showed it to us on VHS. My mind just exploded and it took me years to be able to rewatch it. A landmark of national cinema (Source: @BrendaGarcia-tu4hz 2024 np link).

Man, my geography teacher tried to show this in my classroom, but people wouldn’t shut up, they couldn’t hear anything about this film in the classroom (Source: @78267Joao-Felipe-gigante 2024 np link).

I really wanted my teacher to share this, I only found out about this video because I saw it recommended in a sociology book that my other teacher would never or will never show (Source: @Neut2 2024 np link).

[T]he problem is that the big question in this documentary is terrible for conservative teachers (Source: @PauloHenrique-sx5bs 2025 np link).

I’m glad you tried to see it. I want students like that, not like those who disrupt classes…:) (Source: @CristianedaSilva-cj9nn 2024, np link).

If I ever get the chance to see this again, I will relish every second of it as if it were the first time. And if you are a student, you should check your campus library for ‘Ilha das flores’, because it is amazing (Source: Delaney 2001 np link).

Who else saw this documentary in 2024?? admin course (Source: @ravenamagalhaes8063 2024 np link).

Portuguese class, review, 8th year of elementary school (Source: @leoandradepaiotti 2024 np link).

Here in 2024, studying psychology (Source: @tuannepenha550 2024 np link).

I came to watch because my philosophy and sociology professor asked for this for work, it’s due the day after tomorrow (Source: @MichaelGumball 2024 np link).

I’m a Social Work student and one of the activities asked me to watch the documentary. I confess that before I watched it I wasn’t very interested in the video, but as soon as it started it was extremely impactful, and when it ended I wanted to research more and arrived at its analysis. Really how a short film from decades ago can say so much about our ignorance and lack of compassion among so many other things that you made me see and that today is still a reality, including in the city where I live, which despite being a capital, still has a landfill ! Impressive, sad and intriguing (Source: @mailafazioni8275 2024 np link).

I’m studying nutrition, the documentary was included as the topic of a test question in the subject of Nutrition in Public Health, which is exactly what the documentary aims to criticize (Source: @jeaninefelippe8262 2023 np link).

It is a film that in my life experience I have watched in different situations throughout my journey. The first contact was in a geography class in elementary school, I remember the children laughing because one of the characters had no teeth, and today after so many years that I have come across this film, I had the most visceral experience and it was impossible not to shed tears while watching it. the movie during my lunch break at work while eating a plate of food (Source: Martuscelli in Anon 2022 np link).

This is one of the best short films I’ve seen in ages, conveys such a powerful message so concisely (Source: ann 2008 np link).

A very different approach to getting to the roots of a social problem. Almost has that George Orwell-ish flavor (Source: CS 2008 np link).

I watched this short in the 90s when I was very young and I never forgot it, Cecília Meireles’ final sentence is phenomenal (Source: @danieldmramos 2024 np link).

The film has been denounced as ‘materialistic’ because one of its early credits displays the phrase ‘God doesn’t exist’ (Source: Anon ndd np link).

I left the video before 5 seconds, God does exist (Source: @m3rdaedits570 2024 np link).

God exists!! Amen (Source: @Anonimoxxxururewqo 2024 np link).

Seriously, that’s what you noticed from everything in the video (Source: @maris_co 2025 np link)?

People don’t know how to make documentaries without attacking other people’s faith. You can see that the indoctrination began a long time ago (Source: @mateuse.359 2024 np link).

Are you sure you came to comment on this in a video like this? No idea (Source: @QueridaBrenda 2024 np link).

Your brain is certainly not that developed if all you managed to absorb from this documentary was this (Source: @Filipe_Reboucas 2024 np link).

Go back to school and learn what satire is, what art is (Source: @fitzwilliam1955 2024 np link)!!

Whether there is any god or not, I don’t know. But, certainly, this god doesn’t seem to care about some people and has a distorted sense of justice and loves some of his creations in a very strange way, to say the least (Source: @SilvioJCosta 2025 np link).

If god exists, he forgot the [Ilha Das Flores] or worse, he abandoned them (Source: @somacruz1440 2024 np link)?

Where is God for those people who need it (Source: @BrunoSoares-ce5it 2024 np link)?

Only in the head of those who believe (Source: @mtt8082 2024 np link).

This phrase is a reference to Niscthe [sic.], and it is not quite the Christian God that this phrase was referring to (Source: @LucasSantos-km2ir 2024 np link).

@LucasSantos-km2ir can you tell me which God he was referring to? Now I’m curious (Source: @criadora-de-mundos1 2024 np link).

The iconic phrase by the German philosopher, writer and thinker Nietzsche ‘God is dead’, quoted in the book ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ meant that all the social, moral and religious injustices of that time were based on beliefs, human conflicts , among many others, had died, and that a new time had arrived, in which people themselves would need to create their own values ​​and meaning in life without depending on an externally imposed morality. Therefore, this iconic phrase placed at the beginning of the documentary ‘Ilha das Flores’, means that if someone goes hungry it is not because some deity wants them to go hungry, and what causes this is our indifference towards others, so it…’s up to us to change this situation, because if we wait for some divinity to solve this merely human problem, it won’t happen, because ‘God is dead’ (Source: @LucasSantos-km2ir 2024 np link).

Nevertheless, critic Jean-Claude Bernardet defined Isle of Flowers ‘a religious film’, and the Brazilian National Bishop Confederation awarded the film with the Margarida de Prata (Silver Daisy), calling it ‘the best Brazilian film of the year’ in 1990. In 1995, Isle of Flowers was chosen by the European critics as one of the 100 most important short films of the century (Source: Anon ndd np link).

Very good video, but researching a little more, I found an article where the island’s residents said that the way he portrayed in the film does not match the truth. They say that they did receive donations, but that they didn’t have to compete with the pigs for food, and that when they received the donations, they came bagged straight from the supermarket. Personally, I believe that there are really poor places where human beings eat crumbs, but in this story not everything is real, which is also sad (Source: @arianefreittas422 2024 np link).

The important part of this short masterpiece is not to depict the lives of poor people  in Port Alegre but people in general. The vast differences in the worth of human life despite us being all the same. The scene where the people take what the farmer deemed unworthy for his pigs might well be staged but there are a lot of places on this planet where people have to survive on what other people, sometimes carelessly, throw away (Source: Xcobidoo 2010 np link).

I live in Porto Alegre, the city portrayed in this movie and this is a fake documentary. The director admited paying the people to do the acting. The whole ‘pig has priority’ thing is a scam. Sure they pick stuff from garbage, sure there are pigs, but the situation in wich owner of the site gives preference to pigs as in the movie is fake (Source: wabl 2007 np link).

lha das Flores is NOT a documentary. Ex.: 1) It was filmed kilometers away from Flores Island. 2) Residents were tricked by director Jorge Furtado into pretending to pick up food from the floor. In fact, the food that left the restaurants was already separated: the food that was bad for the pigs and the food that was still usable was given to the residents (it wasn’t the trash and leftovers from customers’ plates – it was the food that wasn’t sold until the end of the day). Watch the interviews with the residents in the video “Ilha das Flores: after the session is over” (available here on YouTube).(Source: @jambelfort 2024 np link).

Furtado should have warned … the residents that an adaptation would be made to cause greater catharsis, and whether they would be in agreement. In an age of ignorance and prejudice without filter or disguise, the film ended up harming the residents of the island (Source: Silva in Anon 2022 np link).

A biased documentary, liar, and racist. The public Ministry of Rio Grande do Sul should file a crime against the producers of this horrendous short film, because this documentary ended up harming even more a population that was already suffering for living near a dump and being close to the breeding of pigs. The people who appear in the documentary ‘getting the trash’ to eat should be compensated, and the producers should publicly portray this fact and apologize to the people of this island in person (Source: alefyslam in eriks4706 nd np link)!

[The]condescending tone of the narrator, whose seemingly ‘objective’ definition [of the tomato grower being ‘Japanese’] seems to miss the mark completely, appears overtly racist. Yet there is a reasoning behind each of the lexical definitions that accompany the images in the documentary. Notice the sequence or terms that are defined throughout Ilha das Flores: ‘Japanese’, ‘human beings’, ‘telencephalon’, ‘opposable thumb’, ‘tomato’, ‘money’, ‘Christ’, ‘Jews’, ‘perfumes’, ‘proft’, ‘pig’, ‘day’, ‘family’, ‘garbage’, ‘island’, ‘water’, ‘flowers’, ‘owner’, ‘estate’, ‘organic origin’, ‘history test’, ‘women and children’, ‘seconds’ and ‘caesium’. The narrative sequence simply moves from one to the other, almost like following hypertext links (Source: Trujillo 2022, p.146-7).

It’s funny that people don’t realize that besides being a satire, at no point is it defined as a documentary in the original short (Source: @okami1819 2024 np link).

Ilha das Flores is not a documentary (Source: bobbyconn 2007 np link).

It’s a short, not a documentary. In the end [Furtado] says that they are just characters, reality and fiction (Source: @thaianelima2309 2024 np link).

[T]he point is not whether exactly on the island of flowers this happens or not. If it doesn’t happen like that there, you can be sure that it happens in other places around the world, and in many ways that are much worse than what was portrayed (Source: @caua8308 2024 np link).

[E]ven if that happened, it doesn’t change the message of the documentary at all. This reality exists and you can see it every day. Just go out on the street and open your eyes (Source: @SimoneSilva-zp1tr 2024 np link).

[I]t doesn’t make it less masterful (Source: EdgarST 2007 np link).

Sorry, the holocaust images made me stop watching this (Source: @andrewsharpe2587 2024 np link).

Yes, this seems macabre at first. Why this image was used in the film (only very briefly, after all) probably also has to do with the fact that Brazilians certainly have a more relaxed approach to this part of history than Germans, for example. At the same time, it is probably also about showing the insanity of humanity on various levels (Source: @KISKISkeepitshort 2024 np link).

@KISKISkeepitshort  Ok, thanks for your response. I’ll give it another watch (Source: @andrewsharpe2587 2024 np link).

We never will get over [The Holocaust] by refusing to reflect it mentally and emotionally (Source: @zzausel 2024 np link).

@zzausel It isn’t something to ‘get over’. Never again. But I did watch the movie again, and the scenes were very brief (Source: @andrewsharpe2587 2024 np link).

I’d argue that [these scenes] are necessary to foreshadow the way that we discard humans just as readily as we discard the ‘garbage’ in our life we don’t want. The Jews are used as a bynote intentionally – although I believe this is not to disrespect them, but to honour their abject suffering – in order to communicate to the viewer that life is shocking, and the title card at the beginning that denies the existence of a deity really hammers home the idea that we can’t just sit by and watch these things happen. There is no saving force that is going to swoop in and stop atrocities from happening. Then the film goes on to highlight an atrocity that is happening right at that very second, at the time of the film. It’s highlighting atrocities of the past so that we can recognise and prevent the atrocities of the present. And so … I believe that the director took these scenes very seriously, and included them for several important reasons. To hammer home the idea that justice must be served, and that we can’t turn a blind eye to the things we’ve suffered in the past (Source: @bennyjones1502 2024 np link).

This is one of my favourite short movies. And It’s good to see it with Eng[lish] subs, so that non-Portuguese speakers can understand and appreciate it. But just an observation/correction: when the narrator talks about Mem de Sá the subs actually shows Gengis Khan, when they weren’t the same person (Source: @igorgavino578 2024 np link).

Hi Igor! Thank you for your comment and observation, you have a good eye … The part of the film you mention required some localization when adapting the text for international audiences. Although Mem de Sá is a very relevant figure in history tests for Portuguese-speaking viewers, the meaning could be lost on people from other locations. Genghis Khan, on the other hand, is better known worldwide (Source: @KISKISkeepitshort 2024 np link)!

@KISKISkeepitshort  the point of watching movies from countries people usually can’t access is to expand our knowledge (Source: @sumiokodai1652 2024 np link).

The film, in my opinion seems to try and explain the wide acceptance of money as a method to transfer payment to someone who can offer goods or services. It’s funny to boot. That the refuse from city dwellers is worth something to someone who might own pigs, that the picked over garbage is worth something to people, that some people are so far down the ladder of opportunities because they don’t have money. Money has a role, a purpose in our lives yet causes some great inequities in the overall rewards of life (Source: bobbyconn 2007 np link).

When reflecting on ‘Ilha das Flores’ … we realize a fundamental paradox in the human condition. Endowed with a highly developed brain and opposable thumbs, human beings have a creative intellectual capacity that allows them to bring about great transformations and create spectacular things. However, this same capacity seems to fail to recognize that its actions can generate significant conflicts. We use our intelligence to obtain immediate benefits, but we often ignore the damage that these choices cause, as if everything were disconnected and not part of the same reality. This failure of understanding reveals a disconnect between our creative potential and our social responsibility, highlighting the urgent need for a more integrated and ethical conscience (Source: @fatimabonato7723 2024 np link).

Maybe one point lacking, that would have fulfilled the whole story: it would be a fulfilled circle, in regard to story telling (if ever in this case) if the wages of workers of that Japanese tomato plant owner were incorporated. Ie, how much mister suzuki gains, and how much from this is given as salary, and so the bare profit for mister suzuki. It is forcing you to watch over and over again, and to think, what really makes a human being coming after a pig in this world, for the ‘chance’ of getting some decayed food. . . . And for last: this film told me the best Freedom definition i ever heard (Source: chimera_s 2006 np link).

Human beings are free: free to go hungry (Source: @quarentadois537 2024 np link).

The worst of all is that this reality still exists in 2024 (Source: @0712Christiano 2024 np link).

[Ilha Das Flores] remains relevant and (unfortunately) current even decades after its launch. … The film shows how the cycle of production and consumption, influenced by the capitalist system, perpetuates the inequality and marginalization of certain communities, which are relegated to conditions of extreme poverty and social exclusion. In this context, the notion of property right is questioned, because it reveals itself as a factor that contributes to the concentration of wealth and resources in the hands of few, while others are deprived of access to basic conditions of subsistence and dignity. Property, in this sense, is not only an individual right, but also a social responsibility that must be exercised in order to promote the collective well-being and to guarantee the dignity of all members of society. The film raises fundamental ethical and moral questions, such as the principle of solidarity. The criticism of the unjust and unequal system presented in [the film] clashes with the values of social justice and care for the most vulnerable. The lack of compassion and assistance to those in need, evidenced in the film, contradicts the teachings of mutual responsibility and care for others, and demonstrates a flaw in the application of the principles of justice and equality that are fundamental to a just and compassionate society. Thus, even after decades, [Ilha Das Flores] continues to be a powerful work that reminds us of the harsh realities faced by many around the world, especially in the face of increased poverty and hunger (Source: Mosna 2024 np link).

I think a feature film like [this] … would be unbearable (Source: Anon 2019 np link).

Since its release, Isle of Flowers has become one of the most acclaimed pseudo-documentary short films of all time. For a number of years, users of the Internet Movie Database voted it the best Brazilian short film and documentary film ever made (Source: Anon ndd np, link).

[Its] didactic, ironic, and good-humoured self-reflexivity … led to an entire school and today is regularly used in TV series, such as City of Men (Source: Nagib 2004 p.242).

I’m using my personal VHS copy of this excellent short in my environmental awareness classes for high school, and students are always stroked by its accurate and intelligent issues. It always provides very large and useful discussion about environmental issues. With a very well humored screenplay and very well balanced use of fiction, documentary and table top animation, this short gives you an overview of what happens in our affluent society with any natural or produced good, with domestic and industrial waste and discussing some very special social issues. Interesting thing is that this short Ilha das Flores (Flower Island, in English pronounced Ilya Dass Floresh) it is not outdated, not growing old and unfortunately still shocking when you think of what is happening with all the waste in our society, when people are less important than the profit made (Source: eliepolti 2005 np link).

[P]erhaps it’s good to start acknowledging that abstract modern principles like ‘freedom’ or ‘equality’ were imaginations that – so far – have in very little solved people’s problems, guaranteed happiness or changed the world for the better. This is, of course, a nice controversial issue to begin this school year with. So I’m inviting you all to see Furtado’s film (it’s only 13 minutes), and to write and exchange your ideas and impressions on the topic. In the end, when discussing freedom, we’re pondering what we are, what we want to be, and what we can be as human beings (Source: Bigatti 2008 np link).

The best doc I saw …, the one that we feel that changes our lives a little (Source: Allyne C 2015, np link).

I watched this video in a health course recently, and today I showed it to my seven-year-old son (Source: @TatianeVieira-b1x 2025, np link).