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 […]
Brazilian Cinema
“Construction of a View” at Festival ECRÃ
My new short film, Construction of a View (Construção de uma Vista), is streaming for free and worldwide as part of the great Festival Ecrã. The festival takes place online until July 25. Next Monday, July 26, I will join fellow filmmakers Bia Lee (Lésbica Enrustida), Diogo Oliveira (Um Gato Sonha com o Norte) in […]
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 […]
Rotterdam, Film Quarterly, Zapruder World
. The International Film Festival Rotterdam is taking place online this year, and the festival has created a collection of critical texts titled Appreciation to go along with this year’s competition. I wrote about Madiano Marcheti’s feature debut, Madalena, and the article is available for free; . The Film Quarterly webinar is available to stream […]
Nũhũ yãg mũ yõg hãm: Essa Terra é Nossa! (2020), Isael Maxakali; Sueli Maxakali; Carolina Canguçu; Roberto Romero
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS Anti-cabotage When the Portuguese colonized Brazil, cabotage became one of the more efficient practices to map and occupy that “new” territory. Generally used to describe systems of transport by foreign companies within the confines of one country, the practice of “cabotagem” consisted of short trips around the Brazilian coast, kickstarting the country’s […]
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 […]
Two webinars
Both Film Quarterly and Zapruder World – two journals where I have just published new essays – will be holding webinars within the next few days to celebrate the release of their new issues and discuss the texts. I’m looking forward to joining my fellow authors to talk about “The Monstrification of Underdevelopment in Contemporary Brazilian […]
More on the monstrification of underdevelopment
Filmmaker Joshua Troxler has shared with me some thoughts that add interesting points and correlations to my article recently published at Film Quarterly, “The Monstrification of Underdevelopment in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema: Ava Yvy Vera and Seven Years in May.”: “For whatever reason it made me think of James Whale’s films – mainly the Frankenstein series […]