VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS Photographic trip Ken Jacobs has been offering a huge number of his films on his Vimeo channel. It’s a terrific opportunity to catch up with one of the most inventive and prolific filmmakers of the past sixty years. There are currently 250 videos (and counting), only a few of which are excerpts […]
Housekeeping
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS . Writing does not always come easy during the quarantine, so I have taken the lockdown as an opportunity for some critical feng shui. I have completely reorganized the website, and the new set up makes it easier to find my writings – some of them dating back to 2007. The list is […]
Veredas Tropicais
My friends at Cinema Tropical – a non-profit organization devoted to the promotion of Latin American cinema in North America – invited me to write a weekly quarantine column for their website, recommending Brazilian films that can be streamed online. Check out the first installment of Veredas Tropicais, where I recommend Gabriel Martins’ excellent short […]
Batguano (2014), Tavinho Teixeira
Tavinho Teixeira, the director of Sol Alegria, which was screened as part of Veredas – A Generation of Brazilian Filmmakers at Lincoln Center in December, has put his previous feature, the delightful Batguano (2014), for free streaming on Vimeo, with English subtitles. I’ve come to appreciate the film even more since I first saw it, in 2014, and […]
Thomas Elsaesser tribute
Columbia University held a memorial for professor Thomas Elsaesser this past Saturday, March 7. He was a visiting professor at the university every Spring term, and was scheduled to teach another class there in 2020. Elsaesser passed away on December 4, 2019, in Beijing, where he was expected to give a lecture. Because of my […]
An interview with Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles
Filmmaker Magazine invited me to do an interview with filmmakers Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles to celebrate the U.S. release of Bacurau. Here’s the interview in the original Portuguese. * * * A Filmmaker Magazine me convidou para fazer uma entrevista com os cineastas Kleber Mendonça Filho e Juliano Dornelles para comemorar o lançamento de Bacurau nos […]
An interview with André Novais Oliveira
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS A mark of the everyday In April 2019, André Novais Oliveira was in New York for the screening of his latest feature, Long Way Home (Temporada, 2018) at New Directors/New Films, after its premiere at the Locarno Film Festival. I’ve been following Novais’ work since 2010, when his astounding short film Ghosts […]
Beyond the future
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS The year starts with good news for researchers interested in contemporary Brazilian cinema: Mostra de Tiradentes, the first big event of the Brazilian festival calendar, has uploaded this year’s main roundtables as podcasts on Spotify. Of course, understanding Portuguese (and, for one of the podcasts, Spanish) is required, but I’ll take this […]
The Moving Creatures (O Que se Move, 2013), Caetano Gotardo
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published at Cinética in May, 2013. Half-open window The Moving Creatures, Caetano Gotardo’s debut feature film, begins with Pedro (Wandré Gouveia) seated in bed, with his back turned to a half-open window – open enough to allow a poisonous breeze to come in and spread across the whole film. We’ll […]
Veredas Deluxe
The experience at Veredas – A Generation of Brazilian Filmmakers has been so rewarding that I would like to stretch it a little longer. Whether you’ve seen or not Gabriel Martins’ and Maurilio Martins’ terrific In the Heart of the World (2019), which was featured in the program at Film at Lincoln Center, Contagem (2010) […]