Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

/ARTS WEEKLY/FILM-BRAZIL: A True Believer in Documentaries

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 30 2004 (IPS) - The ninth international "It’s All True" festival is under way in Brazil until mid-April, celebrating the success of films that "creatively deal with reality," and honouring their main proponent in this Latin American country, Amir Labaki.

Documentaries have been gaining regular showings in Brazil’s commercial cinemas in recent years. Previously, they were considered a non-lucrative product for a limited audience, which is why their distribution was also limited, relegated mostly to showings in schools and on educational television programmes.

But the panorama changed, in keeping with a global trend.

The famed Cannes Film Festival in France incorporated documentaries into its schedule three years ago. For the past four years in Brazil, documentaries compete with fictional feature films for audiences, and in some cases have made strong showings at the box office.

In Brazil, much of that turnaround can be credited to Labaki, a film critic who founded the It’s All True Festival nine years ago. He dedicates all his time to organising that event and to fostering interest in documentaries through his frequent articles appearing in numerous publications.

Author of several books about film, including a biography of noted Cuban documentarist Santiago Alvarez, Labaki also heads the Museum of Image and Sound in Sao Paulo, and is the only non-European member of the board of the world’s leading documentary film event, the international festival of Amsterdam.

His efforts and his festival have given documentaries an unprecedented level of dissemination, awakening interest among audiences who have long been accustomed to television dramas and fictional films.

But in Labaki’s opinion, the one who deserves most credit in this process is Eduardo Coutinho, Brazil’s top documentary filmmaker, who has influenced a new generation of "Coutinian" directors.

Coutinho rose to fame with "Cabra marcado para morrer" (Marked to Die), about a peasant farming leader. He began that masterpiece in 1963, but had to interrupt his work because of the 1964 military coup in Brazil. He finally completed the film in 1984, near the end of the dictatorship.

Unlike many other filmmakers who begin their careers as documentarists but then move on to fiction, Coutinho has remained faithful to his calling, and created a unique style based on interviews with "average" citizens, revealing what Brazilians think and feel, and how they live.

New technologies and changes in filmmakers’ attitudes have played an essential role in the recent evolution of documentary films, attracting media attention and bigger and bigger audiences, according to Labaki.

He cites an example in this phenomenon: U.S. director Michael Moore, who harshly criticised his government’s policy on gun ownership in his film "Bowling for Columbine". When he received the Academy Award for best documentary in 2003, he slammed the George W. Bush administration for invading Iraq.

This new attitude is also reflected in Moore’s penchant for appearing in his own films, playing a sort of "host" in a new kind of investigative journalism programme.

Also taking a spot in front of the camera, Coutinho revealed his working method and interview techniques in "Edificio Master" (The Master Building), which documents daily life in an apartment building that is home to middle class residents.

Other documentarists have gone a step further and made films about their own personal problems and actions, noted Labaki.

Such is the case of Dutch filmmaker Johan Van der Keuken, who recorded his search for alternative cancer treatments in "The Long Holiday" (De grote vakantie), winner of the international prize at the 2001 It’s All True festival.

Films like this have become possible relatively recently, with the development of video technologies that allow one to film just about anything with small digital cameras – throwing open the door for documentary work.

New technologies increased the possibility of innovations "in language and narrative structure," which is evident in the films showing during the festival in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and later in Brasilia, said Labaki.

The programme includes 80 films from around the world – short and feature-length – shown over two weeks in the three cities. Sixteen of these documentaries are competing for the national prize, and 12 for top international honours.

"Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine", by Canadian director Vikram Jayanti, "Woe to Wit" (or "Eizenshtein and Meyerhold), by Russia’s Galina Evtushenko, and "The Weather Underground", by U.S. director Sam Green are among those in the running.

There are also special exhibitions, like the Latin American Showcase (with films from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Puerto Rico), and retrospectives of the best Brazilian music documentaries and of the late French director Jean Rouch, who filmed in Africa for nearly 40 years.

In the festival’s first year, 45 Brazilian films were considered for the programme, now the organisers receive 10 times that many submissions, making the selection process a difficult task.

The increase in the number of documentaries being made, and the growing interest in this genre around the world is due to the fact that societies feel the need to better comprehend events and processes that affect them, reckons Labaki.

Documentaries, in his opinion, constitute "an illuminating pause", a moment of reflection amidst the excess information and images that bombard the population through the mass media.