Brazil - BRAZZIL - Brazilian Cinema - Brazilian Movies Take On the World

Just seven years after being left for dead the Brazilian movie industry has become the talk of the world. Two international accolades—the Golden Bear (the highest prize at the Berlin Film Festival) and an Oscar nomination for best foreign movie—has given notice that the once celebrated national cinematography is alive and kicking once again. The Berlin award, a highlight of one of Europe's three most prestigious film festivals together with Cannes and Venice, was given to the movie Central do Brasil (called Central Station in the U.S.), by Brazilian director Walter Salles. The same work rewarded Brazilian veteran Fernanda Montenegro as best actress with the Silver Bear prize. The last time Brazil won a best-film award in one of the three major festivals was in 1962 when Anselmo Duarte's O Pagador de Promessas (The Promise Keeper) got the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Salles's victory was even more impressive when we consider the heavyweights he competed against in the German Festival. Among them were the much-acclaimed Coen brothers, veteran Robert Altman and legendary French director Alain Resnais. There were also Quentin Tarantino and Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting, which has been nominated for 9 Oscars, including best picture. Fernanda Montenegro also had tough competition, defeating among others Isabella Rossellini and Anne Bancroft.

Central do Brasil was also a huge success with the public. There was a 10-minute standing ovation for the Brazilian movie the first time it was shown in an open screening to 800 people during the festival. The reaction might even have led some jurors to rethink their votes if had not already been intent on selecting the Salles film.

The Brazilian Oscar nomination went to O Que É Isso, Companheiro? (What's Up, Comrade?), released in the United States as Four Days in September. Based on guerrilla-turned-congressman Fernando Gabeira's semi-autobiographical book of the same name, O Que É Isso, Companheiro?, is a loose adaptation of the 1969 kidnapping of American ambassador to Brazil Charles Elbrick (played in the film by Alan Arkin) by a group of leftist guerrillas. Elbrick was in captivity for four days while the kidnappers negotiated with the Brazilian government to exchange him for 15 of their jailed comrades that they were able to liberate and send by plane to Mexico.

Yankee movie critics have given director Bruno Barreto's story mostly warm and even enthusiastic reviews. Miramax, an arm of Disney, the distributor of the film, believes in its popular appeal and had it booked in 70 screens across the U.S. by mid-February. (At the same time, in an ironic statement, Brazilian distributors were able to find only three theatres across the country to re-release the film in Brazil.)

Central do Brasil and O Que É Isso, Companheiro? are just the vanguard of a larger contingent of fresh Brazilian films being produced right now. In the first week of March, nearly 150 films were in various stages of completion. Although about 100 projects were still trying to raise funds, 54 others were already in pre-production and production phases or already in the can ready to be released (see box).

A variety of styles and themes have been allowed to flourish in the Brazilian film revival. "A good thing we've got today is the plurality both in the origin as in the styles of the movies," said José Carlos Avellar, president of distributor Riofilme in a interview with Rio's daily Jornal do Brasil. "There is no longer just one center like São Paulo or Rio, or just a handful of filmmakers as it was during the Cinema Novo (Brazilian New Wave) phase. The overseas market is surprised at the variety."

Salles is of the same opinion. After saying that Brazil has no unifying axis as the Iranian or Chinese film industries have nowadays, he offers: "If there is a unifying factor in the new national cinematography, it resides in the desire of talking about a country called Brazil. The more intrinsically Brazilian our movies are, the greater their chances to become universal and reach a public beyond our borders."

Among the new offerings are dramas and melodramas, comedies and farces, historical pieces and kid stuff, thrillers and experimental works. What has happened? Why suddenly has this apparent new boom in filmmaking emerged? Why this let's-make-a-movie fever among filmmakers, this surge of new talent and the return of veteran directors who seemed content with early retirement? (Three monsters of Brazilian cinematography, Ruy Guerra, Carlos [Cacá] Diegues, and Nélson Pereira dos Santos are busy shooting their own films.)

Among those who have recently made their debut in the director's chair are some very promising talents, such as Sandra Werneck (Pequeno Dicionário Amoroso—Little Love Dictionary), Beto Brant (Os Matadores—The Killers), and the Northeastern duo Paulo Caldas and Lírio Ferreira. Others have yet to release a film, but word of mouth in the industry has already feature as upstarts of promise. One is star TV reporter Pedro Bial who is making his debut with Primeiras Estórias, an adaptation of several short stories by Guimarães Rosa, Brazil's James Joyce.

Luiz Fernando Carvalho, with Lavoura Arcaica (Archaic Fieldwork) is another name to watch. Promising too are Eliane Caffé with Kenoma and Karim Ainouz whose script for Madame Satã (Madam Satan) won a prize from the French government (which had previously given the same award to Central do Brasil).

A source of inspiration for the new crop of films have been book, both recently published and older classics. Among literary works being adapted to the big screen are Policarpo Quaresma, Amor & Cia., Lavoura Arcaica, O Viajante, and Xangô de Baker Street. This last book, by multitalented TV talk-show host Jô Soares, has just been released in the U.S. under the title A Samba for Sherlock.

At 41, Walter Salles (he used a Jr. at the end of his name until 1994), the director of Central do Brasil, is not your run-of-the-mill Third-World-country director. He has lived in Washington, D.C., and studied in Paris between the ages of 6 and 13. The son of Walter Moreira Salles—owner of Unibanco (the third-largest privately owned bank in Brazil) and one of Brazil's wealthiest men—the director preferred to follow his own call instead of managing the family fortune.

"I am glad I was never compelled to work at the family business," the economics graduate once said. "My lack of talent in the financial area is so big that no structure would resist more than two days of my managerial skills."

In 1986 he created VideoFilmes, a documentary and ad agency, which served as a fertile ground for his blooming as a filmmaker. Waltinho, as he is called among his peers, has made two previous full-length movies. He made his debut in 1991 with A Grande Arte(The Great Art), a film with artistically portrayed action scenes featuring knife fights, but little popular appeal. The English-language film cost $5 million, a fortune by Brazilian standards.

But it was his 1995 release, Terra Estrangeira (Foreign Land), a $600,000 black-and-white allegory, that made people pay attention to his talent. The film about a couple who flees Brazil and goes to Portugal after having their savings wiped out by President Fernando Collor de Mello's futile confiscatory measures to freeze prices and eliminate inflation, was featured at a dozen international film festivals, winning the great prize of the Paris's International Film Forum.

Central do Brasil, a movie that cost $2.9 million (with a $300,000 contribution from the Sundance Institute, which in 1996 gave an award to the Marcos Bernstein and João Emanuel screenplay), shows a Brazil little known even to Brazilians. It tells the story of Dora (interpreted by 68-year-old Fernanda Montenegro), a retired teacher who makes a living writing letters that she never sends for illiterate people whose relatives, friends and lovers are in faraway states.

Dora's workplace is the Central do Brasil railway station in downtown Rio, a train terminal for the poor suburbs. The action starts when Dora gets stuck with Josué, the son of a woman for whom she wrote a letter, after a bus accident kills the boy's mother. After some time, Dora decides to seek Josué's father. Vinicius de Oliveira, 11, whom Salles found shining shoes at Rio's Santos Dumont Airport, play the role of Josué. Brazilians have not yet seen the movie, which is scheduled to have its Brazilian opening on April 3.

The screening of Central do Brasil at the Sundance Film Festival was a big success. So much so that that it provoked a bidding war among several American distributors. The impasse was solved by giving the distribution to two companies: Sony Classics paid $500,000 to get the American and Canadian territories while Miramax put up $1.2 million to distribute it in Asia, Africa and Latin America, excluding Brazil.

Next stop: the Oscar. Using O Que É Isso, Companheiro? as inspiration—the movie screened at the Berlin Film Festival without great repercussion last year—Salles is already thinking about his film being chosen by Brazil to represent the country at next year's Oscar. "We need to wait, however," he says. "First let's root for O Que É Isso, Companheiro?"

With an eye at the future and the backing of Swiss producer Arthur Cohn (who was also behind Central do Brasil)Walter Salles has four other projects in the pre-production stage. There is Wait for Me, an original screenplay about a Mexican immigrant to the U.S.. The film will be shot in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There is also Últimos Diálogos (Last Dialogues) by cartoonist-writer Millôr Fernandes, the tale of a pianist who decides to leave Brazil and then returns to her country 30 years later when she becomes ill. O Sorriso Etrusco (The Etruscan Smile) is still another project. Based on a book by Spanish author José Luís Sampedro, it also tells a homecoming story, in this case of a 70-year-old man who believes that he has cancer. A girl who dreams about escaping from the circus where she was born is Salles' fourth movie project. It is based on a book by French author Christian Bobin.

Salles has been as active as ever. In partnership with Daniela Thomas, Salles is in the post-production phase of Contagem Regressiva (Countdown), a movie that will be released at the end of this year. Again with Thomas, he has been putting the final touches in O Primeiro Dia (The First Day), even though the film is scheduled for release in September 1999.

Director Bruno Barreto got the good news about his Oscar nomination while editing One Tough Cop, his latest American effort. With Barreto's nomination, a Brazilian got the coveted nod from the Academy of Hollywood for the fourth time. Interestingly enough, when it last occurred in 1996, another Barreto was the lucky nominee, when Bruno's brother Fábio Barreto received an Oscar nod for O Quatrilho. Another nomination occurred in 1962, when Anselmo Duarte' s Pagador de Promessas, which had already won the Cannes Golden Palm, was also nominated by the Academy. Brazil's other chance at the Oscar was for Hector Babenco's The Kiss of the Spider Woman. William Hurt got a best actor Oscar for his performance in that 1984 movie.

In a recent interview, Barreto stressed the fact (also pointed out by several critics) that Four Days in September is not a Manichean story: "My film has ambiguous and controversial characters: a torturer who is not a villain, a bandit who is a hero, a conscientious man who kidnapped the American ambassador."

After its initial presentation at the Berlin Festival in 1997, every major company in the U.S. that distributes foreign (including Goldwyin, Sony Classics, First Look, and Miramax) showed interest in Barreto's work. Miramax, which ended up becoming the movie's American distributor, did not spare any effort to release and divulge the work.

Barreto, who turned 43 this March, has had a long romance behind the cameras. He was still 11 when he borrowed a camera to shoot his first movie, the short Os Três Amigos (The Three Friends). At 17 he made his first feature film, Tati, a Garota (Tati, the Girl), which was a commercial success.

Barreto has recently moved from Los Angeles to New York. He never hid his contempt for Hollywood, but the move was also helped by the fact that his wife Amy Irving (Steven Spielberg's ex wife) is a Broadway star. In an interview with daily O Estado de S. Paulo, Barreto, who has 12 feature films to his credit, talked about his intentions as a moviemaker: "After living in L. A. for eight years, I found out that I didn't have to settle down in town to make the type of movie that I enjoy. I will never become a mainstream director using special effects and the like."

Barreto is very famous in Brazil. He directed the 1976 Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos (Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands), which has the distinction of being the top grossing Brazilian movie in the domestic market. More than 10.7 million Brazilians went to see the story of a woman who had to manage two spouses at the same time: one alive and circumspect, with the other being the lewd mocking ghost of her late first husband. In comparison, 13 million saw Jaws, the all-time champion being finally threatened by Titanic, which has just started its run and was seen by 6 million people in a six-week period.

With 270,000 tickets sold O Que É Isso, Companheiro? became the third most seen Brazilian movie in Brazil last year, losing only to the historic epic Gerra dos Canudos (Canudos War) and small intimate piece Pequeno Dicionário Amoroso (Little Love Dictionary). Two other successful Barreto films were Romance da Empregada (The Maid's Romance) and A Estrela Sobe (The Star Rises).

But he had also some bombs, including Gabriela, which starred Italian actor Marcelo Mastroianni and Sônia Braga. Bruno's career in the U.S. has been just modest, with Carried Way with Dennis Hopper being considered his best work in English. He has also made the political thriller Show of Force .

Since the release of O Que É Isso, Companheiro?, the director—who has spoken of his political non-commitment more than once—has been crucified by most of the Brazilian left, which accuses him of tampering with history and presenting a rosy picture of the military dictatorship by portraying a conscience-stricken torturer. He has also been occasionally criticized for making plain, too-linear films. In response, Bruno has made fun of some more hermetic films "in which the best part is the interview with the director at the end."

Barreto, who will continue to make films in Brazil—his next movie will be Senhorita Simpson (Miss Simpson) based in a book by Sérgio Sant'Anna—has declared with bitterness that he doesn't want to return Brazil and live in a country where "winning is a sin." In an interview with daily Folha de São Paulo, the director considered cowardly the justification given by the Brazilian commission who selected his film for Oscar consideration: "They said they had chosen the movie because Miramax, a strong independent distributor in the United States, was going to distribute it. They didn't have the guts to say that the movie was better than A Ostra e o Vento (The Oyster and the Wind) and A Guerra de Canudos (The Canudos War). Brazilians suffer of pathological optimism, premature celebration and lack of self-esteem. This makes us a nation of losers."

Barreto revealed that he had chosen a Brazilian composer for the sound track of O Que É Isso, Companheiro?, but that he changed his mind after this unnamed "very respected" musician started to "ideologically police the film." Concluded the director: "The ideological textbook limits people aesthetically. I am forcefully against any level of political commitment by artists."

All this recent creative action in the Brazilian movie industry has been credited to a series of factors. The most important one is the Lei do Audiovisual (Audiovisual Law), a legislation created in 1993 allowing companies to invest in cultural projects up to 3% of the money the firms owe the government in income taxes. Thanks to that, the number of domestic movies released has grown from six in 1994, to 18 in 1995, and 20 last year.

The globalization phenomenon has also caught the Brazilian film industry. Barreto, a Hollywood insider, has Oscar winning actor Alan Arkin starring in O Que É Isso, Companheiro? Alberto Graça, who directs O Dia da Caça (The Day of the Prey), has hired French actress Barbara Schulz to work in the film to be shot in the Amazon. Chatô, which is still in pre-production, will be shot in several foreign cities, including London, Paris, and Los Angeles. Scheduled to be directed by Guilherme Fontes, with the biggest budget ever for a Brazilian movie, it will tell the story of media mogul Francisco de Assis Chateaubriand (1892-1968), who was the owner of Diários e Emissoras Associados, a conglomerate of 18 TV stations, 34 newspapers, 36 radio stations, and several magazines.

International co-productions are also becoming more common place. Renowned director Ruy Guerra is right now in Cuba shooting Estorvo, the film version of composer Chico Buarque de Hollanda's book of same name. Estorvo's executive producer, Jom Tob Azulay, recently told Jornal do Brasil: "Historically, we are a culture isolated from the rest of the world. I think that international co-productions are bound to become a tendency from now on."

In 1994, a mere 350,000 tickets were sold for Brazilian movies in Brazil. Two years later, that number had jumped to 2.5 million. According to government estimates, 5% of the 70 million movie tickets sold in 1997 were for domestic films. In 1998 this number should increase, but nobody sees in the near future a return to the golden '70s when up to 50% of the tickets sold were for Brazilian movies.

After the battle to shoot a Brazilian film has been successfully won, producers and directors still have another tough hurdle: to find a free screen willing to show their movies. With a mere 1,500 screens for a population of 160 million—the United States has 25,000 screens and a Hollywood blockbuster opens in three times as many theaters in the U.S. as the total of theaters throughout Brazil—national producers have to fiercely compete with the Hollywood product, which has a virtual monopoly in the country. The same scenario occurs in the video stores, where only 15% of the inventory is Brazilian.

The U.S.-made epic Titanic, which is taking 20% of all available screens and already setting a record with six million spectators and more than $26 million in box office within six weeks after its release, continued strong in Brazil's theaters. However, Tizuca Yamazaki's O Noviço Rebelde, the most successful Brazilian film so far this year, with popular TV comedian Renato Aragão, has drawn around 1.5 million spectators before being released in the smaller theaters of the Brazilian interior. In recent years, Brazil's biggest grossing movies before Titanic were Ghost ($16.7 million) and Independence Day ($15.3 million).

The one-million-spectator mark has been like a mirage for most recent Brazilian movies. Carla Camurati's Carlota Joaquina, Princeza do Brasil and Oscar-nominated O Quatrilho both drew 1.2 million viewers, but they were the exception. More typical is that a domestic film cannot attract even 100,000 spectators.

The most popular Brazilian film of all times, Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos (Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands) brought more than 10.7 million Brazilians to the movie theaters but this was in the '70s, when the national movie industry was getting the lion's share of the box office, with about 50% of the box-office total.

Luiz Carlos Lacerda, director of For All, is one of those waiting in line to get its turn in a theater. Says he: "I am expecting a definition from Columbia, which released 85 American movies in 1997 and intends to release another 100 this year."

Director Hector Babenco, best known for his film Pixote, is leading a movement to demand more protection from the government. He argues that other countries like France, Germany and Argentina have been doing this for years. "We cannot, in name of globalization leave movies unprotected," he recently told Jornal do Brasil. "The film industry is a source of employment. There is no reason to keep the cinema as the market's virgin when even the auto industry is protected by import taxes."

At the beginning of March the domestic movie industry got another extra help from the government, which has now mandated that theaters must reserve at least 49 days to show Brazilian films. (Previously, theater owners could get by with a 35-day run for Brazilian movies.) According to Moacyr de Oliveira, secretary of the Culture Ministry's Audiovisual Department, the President himself changes the quota every year. "The number has increased due to the greater cultural production," Oliveira explained.

Oliveira responds to the critics that there would not be the need for any quota if the distributors guaranteed an ample distribution and exhibition of Brazilian movies. For those caught disobeying the law, there is a 10% fine over the weekly income at the box-office. However, Oliveira showed that the presidential decree has no teeth since nobody controls or enforces the quota: "We don't know it the law is being met. What we know is that only 5% of the total number of tickets sold in 1997 were for Brazilian movies, which is too little." Around 70 million movie tickets were sold in Brazil last year.

As expected, theater owners protested. Roberto Darze, president of the Exhibitors Federation, also complained because he had not been told about the change. "Our sector is against any quota for the showing of movies," he declared before guaranteeing that there is no discrimination against the Brazilian-made product.

Most of the exhibitors seem to doubt that the domestic movie industry can produce enough to meet the new government-imposed quota of 49 days. For the multiplexes that have no more than seven screens, a special formula in which some screens can have as little as 28 days of the domestic product exists. Multiplexes with more than seven screens need a minimum of 35 days of Brazilian movies for every screen.

According to the 80-year old Severiano Ribeiro group, which has 140 screens in 13 state capitals, quotas don't make sense. Quality and economic viability should be the sole criteria, says Arturo Neto, director of the company. He admits, however, that there will be no problem to meet the quota if there is a variety of new movies. Says he: "The public is the one who determines when a film is exhibited. None of us is so insensitive as to stop showing a movie that is getting a good audience."

The difficulty to book a Brazilian movie became so frustrating to producer Luiz Carlos Barreto, the patriarch of the Barreto moviemaking family (which includes sons Bruno and Fabio and wife Lucy) that last February he called a press conference in which he chastised the exhibitors and called theaters film motels due to the short time that they show national films. He was livid because he could not find more than one screen in Rio to re-release his son's movie O Que E Isso, Companheiro? after the film won a nomination for the Oscar.

On a more optimistic note, some people in the industry are betting that the larger number of Brazilian films being produced will coincide with a dramatic expansion of movie theaters in the country with the recent multiplication of multiplexes with up to 20 screens each. More than 600 new screens are being promised for the next two years.

A Little History

The movies were still called omniograph when Cariocas (Rio residents) had their first glimpse of the moving images that would become the most popular entertainment of the first half of the century. It happened on July 8, 1896.

By 1908, when Hollywood didn't yet exist, Brazilians were already making movies. Humberto Mauro was Brazil's first great filmmaker. His masterpiece Ganga Bruta (Rough Gangue) was released in 1933. In 1929, Mario Peixoto, another talented pioneer had already filmed the silent Limite (Limit).

The first successful movies with broad popular appeal would appear in the '40s. Comedians Oscarito and Grande Otelo became huge box-office hits between 1944 and 1955. They were but two of the stars reunited by Atlântida, a studio from Rio responsible for popularizing a non-sophisticated and straightforward comedic film genre known as chanchada.

In response to the lowbrow offerings of Atlântida, a group from Sao Paulo led by magnate Francisco "Ciccilo" Matarazzo Sobrinho created the Companhia Vera Cruz in 1949. They hired foreign technicians and brought back to Brazil Alberto Cavalcanti, who at this time had already made a name as a great filmmaker in Europe.

Vera Cruz was short-lived. Lavish spending, clashing egos, less-than-popular stories and a lack of a distribution structure led to the Sao Paulo studio's demise. By 1954 it had closed its doors even though the studio built in São Bernardo do Campo in the São Paulo ABC region continued making movies under the name of Brasil Filmes. Their only big success was O Cangaceiro (The Bandit), a release from 1953, which became also an international triumph.

At the end of the '50s, inspired by Italian neorealism, Brazil saw the birth of Cinema Novo (New Cinema), whose motto was: "a camera in the hand and an idea in the head". The phrase has been often attributed to Gláuber Rocha, the Cinema Novo's most talented filmmaker. However, Rocha himself gave authorship of the phrase to Paulo Cezar Saraceni, another leader of the movement.

The Cinema Novo would come to full bloom in the next decade. The Brazilian new wave made movies strong in social content with little concern for technique or broad popular appeal. They were perfect pieces to win art film festivals and become cult movies. Gláuber Rocha (1939-1981), considered a genius by many, became the main exponent of this so-called "aesthetics of hunger."

Rocha's 1968 film, O Dragão da Maldade Contra o Santo Guerreiro (The Dragon of Evil Against the Warrior Saint), won him the best director's prize at the 1969 Cannes Festival. He also received an award in Czechoslovakia for his first movie, Barravento (1961). The second one, Deus e o Diabo na Terra do
Sol (God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun) (1963), a synthesis of Brazil's rural predicament, is part of the collection of the best movies of all time from the New York Museum of Modern Art.

The contemporary Brazilian cinema had its heyday in the '70s and the beginning of the '80s. During that period the film industry was producing some 100 movies a year. The participation of the national film industry on Brazilian screens during the '70s varied from 35% to 50% a year. This number fell to zero in 1990, but it has been slowly climbing up.

March 1998
Cover Story

Coming Soon
to a Theater
Near You

Alessandra Dalevi

A Little History

Next Attractions

From ready-to-shoot to ready-to-show there are 54 movies in the line of production in Brazil right now. We don't include here some 100 other titles still trying to secure financing.

March 1998 Cover Story

Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

Alessandra Dalevi

A Little History

Next Attractions

From ready-to-shoot to ready-to-show there are 54 movies in the line of production in Brazil right now. We don't include here some 100 other titles still trying to secure financing.

March 1998
Cover Story

Coming Soon
to a Theater
Near You