/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/FILM-BRAZIL: Documentaries Gain Prestige While Revealing Diversity

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 18 2000 (IPS) - Brazil is discovering that a country with so much natural, cultural, religious, ethnic and social diversity can have a documentary film industry that puts out works stranger than fiction, while at the same time promoting national self-awareness.

The fifth international film festival “It’s All True,” underway this week in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, is considered by critics to be the most important in Latin America and stands as proof that Brazil’s documentaries are winning their place in the sun.

A large part of this prestige is due to Eduardo Coutinho, whose film “Goat Marked for Death” was chosen by critics, film-makers and journalists involved in the festival as the standard-setting work for the genre in Brazilian cinema.

The production of the film – about the 1962 assassination of JoFo Pedro Teixeira, a peasant leader in northeast Brazil – was interrupted by the 1964 military coup and the subsequent political repression. Coutinho’s work was not finished until 1984 when the dictatorship was coming to an end.

He combined what he had filmed in the 1960s with interviews he conducted with the survivors 20 years later – and the result is a resounding denunciation of the persisting injustices and violence the local peasants continue to suffer.

The film-maker was able to reunite the Teixeira family, which had dispersed following the death of the father. One daughter committed suicide after JoFo’s assassination. The eight remaining children believe their mother died while living in hiding in a neighbouring state.

Coutinho, considered Brazil’s best documentary director, now has a more active filming schedule. The rhythm is frenetic in comparison to the two decades required to finish “Goat Marked for Death,” he commented.

Last year the commercial film circuit showed Coutinho’s “Santo forte,” a surprising account of Brazil’s complex religious attitudes, based on simple interviews with the residents of a small ‘favela’ (slum) in Rio de Janeiro.

By the end of this year, he hopes to finish a film on how the poor who coexist with the wealth of Rio’s beach communities handled the arrival of the year 2000.

The interviews and images, recorded with five cameras, were made Dec 31 and Jan 1 in two favelas near Copacabana, a beach where millions of people gathered to celebrate the new year.

At the festival, audiences can find a panorama of religions in Brazil, a made-for-television film about the country’s musical diversity and several works about urban violence in various cities, and they are all feature-length films, a sharp contrast to the previous trend of keeping documentaries short.

Urban violence and the need to understand it explain the current popularity of documentaries in Brazil, says writer Marcelo Rubens Paiva, who also points to the 500-year anniversary of the Portuguese arrival in Brazil as a stimulus behind reviewing the nation’s history.

This wave of activity is not limited to Rio de Janeiro. In Recife, a city in Brazil’s impoverished northeast, film-makers Paulo Caldas and Marcelo Luna just finished filming “The Little Prince’s Rap against the Greasy Souls,” which studies the life choices of the people living in one of the city’s most violent neighbourhoods.

The film tells the story of two young men, local heroes who take opposite approaches to life.

One, Helinho, chose to become a vigilante, a professional assassin whose mission is to “cleanse” the neighbourhood of criminals. At age 21, he confessed to having killed 44 people and was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

The other, Alexandre Garnize, is the “little prince” who, as a percussionist in a rap band, leads a movement that spawned the creation of neighbourhood musical groups.

This musical “hip-hop” movement, imported from the United States and well adapted to the peripheries of Brazil’s big cities, constitutes an important factor in containing crime, according to director Caldas.

Revealing the strangest realities from the farthest reaches of the country is “Cinema Mambembe,” product of a unique adventure involving directors Lais Bodanzky and Luiz Bolognesi, both from Sao Paulo.

The two spent eight months in 1997 visiting dozens of small towns in Brazil’s north and northeast, showing films dealing with aspects of the nation’s reality, and filming the reactions and commentaries of local residents who, in general, had never seen a film before. Many of the viewers were illiterate.

The adversities of the film-makers’ travels along precarious roads, down rivers and through wilderness areas are all caught on film, such as their experiences in indigenous villages.

People filled plazas or abandoned movie theatres to see the films shown by Bodanzky and Bolognesi, and they expressed curious reactions. One young woman, for example, confessed her surprise that films were not made exclusively in the United States.

The documentaries the film-makers showed about violence and poverty in the big cities eliminated illusions rural people held about the prosperity of the large urban centres.

“Brazil does not know Brazil,” says a song popular in the 1970s. But now, documentary film has resurfaced and is stronger, and apparently recognises this situation and means to change it.