VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS I have started a new website and will stop posting here. My Ph.D. at NYU is approaching the end and I imagine they will eventually pull the plug on this, so I am moving everything to a private server to make sure nothing gets lost. That was also an opportunity to rethink […]
Blog
An interview with Helena Solberg
The great Cinelimite has published an interview I did with the filmmaker Helena Solberg focused on her two first films, A Entrevista (1966) and Meio-Dia (1970), which are currently streaming for free on their website. They are terrific films, and A Entrevista in particular is one of my very favorite Brazilian films of the 1960s […]
A study of “A Day in Life” at the Essay Film Festival
On Saturday, the Essay Film Festival at Birkbeck University of London, England, will hold a day of study of the work of Eduardo Coutinho. Besides screening his landmark 1984 film, Cabra Marcado para Morrer (Twenty Years Later), and his last film, Last Conversations (finished by João Moreira Salles and Jordana Berg in 2014), they are […]
Sieranevada (2016), Cristi Puiu / The Ornithologist (2016), João Pedro Rodrigues
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published at Cinética in October 2016. The symbolic is dead, long live the symbolic 1. Cristi Puiu’s Sieranevada starts with an awkwardly composed shot of an SUV carelessly parked in the middle of the street. Lary (Mimi Brănescu) gets off and goes inside a building, leaving his idling vehicle for […]
Oráculo (2021), Melissa Dullius & Gustavo Jahn
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS The trees and the blues In the first shot of Oráculo, a metal bridge is framed by waving palm trees in the foreground, shaken by the same wind that allegedly fascinated Georges Méliès when he first watched a Lumière film. The contrast between foreground and background carves a gestalt between the idyll […]
Açucena (2021), Isaac Donato
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS The fear of cinema The Tiradentes film festival is happening online this year until January 30th, and a good number of the films are screening worldwide with English subs. In the past decade or so, Tiradentes has established itself as one of the main sources of new talent in Brazilian cinema. With […]
Film Quarterly 74.2 – New Brazilian Cinema
I’m in great company in the new issue of Film Quarterly, which has a dossier on Brazilian cinema edited by B. Ruby Rich and João Luiz Vieira, available for subscribers and scholars with institutional access. My article is titled “The Monstrification of Underdevelopment in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema: Ava Yvy Vera and Seven Years in May,” […]
Three Brazilian short films 2010-2020
The excellent Cine Festivais invited a large group of critics to submit lists of three short/medium length Brazilian films made between 2010 and 2020 which have had a deep impact on each writer. I have translated the short accompanying text that I wrote about my choices, and you may watch one of the films – […]
Three events
I am looking forward to joining Dana Khromov and Robert Cargni on Monday, November 9, for a virtual discussion of Marília Rocha’s Aboio (Cattle Callers, 2005). The film will have a virtual screening as part of a series programmed by Robert Cargni for the Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Watch the […]
