25/03/2024 - Sissel Morell Dargis spent years sharing in the passion of Brazilian balloon builders to make this explosive yet intimate documentary, between utopia and harsh realities

Danish-Spanish filmmaker Sissel Morell Dargis moved to Brazil when she was 19. As a teenager, who was painting graffiti, doing street art and freelancing as a photographer, she helped found a community project in Rocinha around cultural exchange in and out of favelas. Coming from the outside and settling in the local graffiti community eventually led her to discover an underground art world: that of Brazilian balloon builders. The so-called ‘baloeiros’ operate in secret, fashioning air balloons of enormous sizes, all out of colourful tissue paper, to marvel at their eventual flight. Balomania, Dargis’s feature documentary on the topic, had its world premiere as part of the DOX:AWARD competition at this year’s CPH:DOX. 

Dargis has directed short films out of Cuban film school (EICTV), but Balomania is her first documentary feature project and has been years in the works. At first, the baloeiros are rather reticent, as unsure as us viewers of what this young Danish woman and her camera might want out of a secret community of men whose passion is deemed illegal by the state. With gradual (and frankly astounding) trust, Dargis takes us on a journey most of us would have never imagined, revealing spaces of pure joy, scintillating creativity, and utopian devotion to art for art’s sake, all in the so-called "underbelly".

But Balomania is more than just a film about Brazil’s “Balloon Mafia”; it is a testament to brotherhood, with the freedom to seek the beautiful and the absurd in the same place. These men are all tatted-up, husky and rough, but share an unconditional love to the process of glueing together pieces of silk or paper for years, to produce figures, shapes, and faces (such as Rocky or 2Pac) on hot air balloons that can be as high as an apartment block. There are competitions and gangs who measure up, but the goal is to make the biggest and the most beautiful balloon; to release it, to see it light up the sky, and to chase its flight. All of this amounts to a spectacle and a rare sight, because their doing is criminalised, which makes the documentary all the more precious for recording the process of crafting and the launch of such balloons. And not least, for capturing the anticipation between the two stages.

Years of camaraderie, gaining trust and filming have gone into making this gem of a film, and it all pays off: Balomania is both thrilling — with car chases and clandestine meetings — and incredibly tender in conveying the men’s affection for a grand hobby which only costs them money and brings them none. Most of them, we see, have troubles with their loved ones because of how dedicated they are, and the frankness with which they profess their love for balloon-building comes across as anything but naive. As the police pursue them and the severity of the law increases year by year, the baloeiros emerge as one of the last bastions of freedom and devotion to large-scale beauty, a last pocket of utopia, and a vacuum in the capitalist world.

Balomania was produced by House of Real (Denmark) and co-produced by Polar Star Films (Spain).