Because we are and we aren’t tropicalists presents recent moving image works by artists and filmmakers from Recife, Pernambuco, a city in the north-east of Brazil that is renowned for its film and art scenes. The works depict Recife and the surrounding Pernambucan interior to engage the material realities of its beaches, squares, churches, parks, tropical urban forests, and bridges and canals, as well as the sertão (the arid interior region of the State). These accounts produce fictional visions of the modern built environment, re-envisioning an urban space marked by rampant real estate speculation and the social movements that contest it. The city’s Other appears in the form of tropical forests and the sertão, proposing both the fecundity and aridity of these landscapes in jarring opposition to — but continually present in — Recife’s everyday imaginary.