/ARTS WEEKLY/FILM-BRAZIL: Golden Year for South America’s ‘Bollywood’

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 20 2004 (IPS) - Brazilian film enjoyed a honeymoon with audiences this year, consolidating its position as a sort of South American movie capital, with the Globo network as the centre of production for box office hits.

Figures for 2003 more than triple the 7.3 million tickets sold for Brazilian-made films last year, reflecting the commercial success of some productions in particular, and especially those of the Globo Filmes conglomerate.

Another decisive factor is the actors. Many established their place among the stars on through their acting roles on the Globo television network, their fame cultivated on soap operas and dramatic series broadcast across Brazil and exported to a hundred countries.

These actors appear in nearly all Brazilian-made films, in theatre, advertising, and even as the face of social campaigns.

The Brazilian film industry, which last year struggled to achieve an eight-percent share of box office sales, marking a recovery from near extinction in the early 1990s, this year could surpass the 22 percent mark, according to producers and to specialised journals.

This is quite a feat, although the best years of the national film industry in this sense were in the 1970s, when it achieved 35 percent of ticket sales at cinemas.

The strong influence of television ensures output and audiences, but many filmmakers and critics see this phenomenon as negative. Some argue that film is becoming too much like television, even subjugated to that mass medium of communications, creating distortions and contributing very little to "cinematographic language".

But the alliance with television is seen by others as necessary for the survival of film in Brazil, which even today produces relatively few feature-length movies: just over 30 a year.

Brazil is a far cry from India, for example, where the hundreds of films made each year capture 90 percent of the enormous domestic market, justifying its nickname, "Bollywood", in reference to the U.S. centre of stardom and filmmaking, Hollywood.

Brazil has its own Bollywood, though output is low in numbers, but it seems to have rediscovered the route to big box office hits.

The biggest contribution in 2003, with nearly five million moviegoers, was "Carandirú", a film about the life in a prison complex of that name in Sao Paulo, where police massacred at least 111 inmates in an uprising that took place in 1992. The prison was shut down in 2002. However, "Carandirú" was not a Globo production.

But Globo did put out "Lisbela e o prisioneiro" (Lisbela and the Prisoner) and "Os normais" (The Normals), which drew a million viewers each to the Brazilian cinemas. Both originated in the TV Globo centre headed by Guel Arraes.

Arraes, son of the president of the Brazilian Socialist Party and legendary political leader Miguel Arraes, has been responsible for the most creative programming on Brazilian TV since the 1980s, with innovative humour, agile and youthful use of language, as well as adapting cinematographic resources to the small screen.

That creativity owes much to Arraes’s education. He studied film in France after growing up in Algiers, where his father was exiled. Hired by Globo, he developed a style of his own that is now proving its effectiveness in the world of cinema.

Several of the programmes that his group created for TV have been made into movies. Such is the case of "The Normals", a sophisticated comedy about the ridiculous situations confronting a couple in their daily life.

Arraes himself directed "Lisbela", which was even more warmly received than his previous films, "Auto da Compadecida", of 2000, and "Caramuru", of 2001, both originally filmed as television series but were condensed into feature-length productions for the big screen.

Another production associated with the Arraes team, "The World Cup Is Ours", of the comic group Casseta & Planeta, was a disappointment to the public and its high expectations, and is not expected to draw more than 700,000 people, despite its popular "savage" humour and the football theme – a national passion.

Globo, in addition to winning over audiences with its fresh language and maintaining a roster of famous actors, also has unsurpassed power to disseminate its message – and its images.

Its films are launched with an advertising deployment not seen elsewhere, as the consortium includes numerous newspapers, magazines and radio stations, and a televisions network that practically holds a monopoly over certain viewing hours. All of these media are mobilised to promote Globo Filmes productions.

All of these factors have helped the Globo group to give Brazilian-made films a push at the box office.

The "golden year" of 2003 ended with a superproduction with a budget of 10 million reais (3.4 million dollars), a sum practically unheard of for making a film in this country.

"Acquaria" premiered in mid-December at 320 cinemas throughout Brazil. Normally, such widespread distribution is reserved for Hollywood’s blockbusters, which have proven they can generate revenues.

"Acquaria" is a story that takes place in the future, the Earth turned to desert, and with its few survivors fighting over a machine that looks for water in the arid land. A third of the film is based on special effects.

Although the film is not a product of Globo, its stars built their fame in the network. Sandy and Junior are siblings and singers who have sold millions of albums of their music for children and adolescents.