Welcome

It’s been years since I’ve last had a blog and I’ve never stopped entertaining starting a new one. However, every idea I had for it felt superfluous considering my affiliation with Cinética – which not only takes significant chunks of my time, but also provides an outlet for my work as a film critic – and the more immediate interaction allowed by social media.

It was only when I moved from Rio de Janeiro to New York, about 20 months ago, that the idea of starting a blog in English started taking shape, and it is only now that I have found the time to actually get it off the ground. On the one hand, I felt like I could use a space to openly engage with the city’s abundant cinematic repertoire, which has allowed me to revisit and discover films that have made quite an impact on me, but that I cannot necessarily transpose to the more elaborate format of text published by Cinética. On the other, the still limited interaction between a pulsing scene of critics and film scholars in Brazil and the rest of the world – justified by both the language barrier and the size of the country, which often creates a (not always welcome) sense of self-sufficiency – hits me as counterproductive for both parts, and while a blog cannot remedy that, it might hopefully start a conversation.

This page will also be used as an aggregator for my writings on cinema, spread not only through the many issues Cinética has published since I joined the magazine, in 2007, but also in catalogs and books. I have then created separate sections to link/republish as many of those articles as I possibly can, including new translations to English of some of them – starting here with one of the two short pieces I wrote for the catalog of the complete Jean Luc-Godard retrospective put together by Heco Produções, in Brazil, about Goodbye to Language. Another English translation of one of my articles, which I’ll link here soon, has just been published at Cinética: Alê Abreu’s Oscar nominee for Best Animated Feature Boy and the World. As for those who can read Portuguese, I can’t pass the opportunity to invited you to read the latest issue of Cinética, dedicated to Pedro Costa’s monumental Horse Money. It’s a strong group of articles about one of the decade’s greatest films and I hope some of them will surface in English translations soon enough.