The Fourth Wall film club is screening Anselmo Duarte’s The Given Word (O Pagador de Promessas, 1962) on 16mm tonight, and they have invited me to do a brief introduction. The film was based on a play by Dias Gomes and won the Palm D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year. The screening is […]
Brazilian Cinema
Araby (Arábia, 2017), Affonso Uchôa & João Dumans
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS For the sake of the song The title of Araby (Arábia) – an enigmatic choice for a film set in Minas Gerais, Brazil – appears twice during its 96 minutes. The first time is as a conventional title card, except that it is introduced over 20 minutes into the film, separated from […]
News from Home
. The winners of the 8th Cinema Tropical awards will screen at the Museum of the Moving Image this coming weekend, February 2-4. I was part of the fiction film jury last year and, if the criteria haven’t changed, the awards are for Latin American films with a festival premiere between May 2016 and April […]
Rewatching Eduardo Coutinho
Rewatching the films of Eduardo Coutinho, like I did yesterday thanks to Flaherty NYC, is very emotionally demanding. Being in the theater, seeing him and listening to him once more brings back his presence as absence: for Brazilian cinephiles, seeing a new Coutinho film was a ritual one could count on, but no longer can. Today, […]
Gabriel Mascaro: Ebbs and Flows
I still haven’t gotten around to writing about Neon Bull for Cinética, but I didn’t want to overlook the beginning of Gabriel Mascaro’s first US retrospective, starting today at Lincoln Center. I’ve been writing about Mascaro’s work since 2009, when High Rise (Um Lugar ao Sol – literal translation: a place in the sun) premiered […]
Housemaids (Doméstica), by Gabriel Mascaro (Brazil, 2012)
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published in Portuguese at Cinética in May 2013 and in English in February 2014, later republished in revised form in Victor Guimarães (ed.), Housemaids (Recife: Desvia, 2014) 22-27. Imponderable dramaturgy When I wrote about Gabriel Mascaro’s 2010 short The Adventures of Paulo Bruscky, one of the notes left out of the final […]