I’ve so far covered US and Canadian films by and about indigenous peoples, but there’s a significant community of native peoples still living in Brazil and around the South American continent, whose languages and traditions have hugely informed the development and culture of many countries of the region. The writer-directors of this film more recently made The Buriti Flower, which screened as part of the Melbourne Film Festival this year, and this earlier work also finds a blend of documentary and fiction to tell a local story.
The plot synopsis for this movie reads: “Denying his duty and in order to escape a crucial process of becoming a shaman, Ihjãc runs away to the city. Far from his people and culture, he faces the reality of being indigenous in contemporary Brazil.” In many ways, it says more about the problem with trying to sum up a film in a sentence or two than it does about this film. For while the young man (Henrique Ihjãc Krahô) at the centre of this film has indeed lost his father and does indeed at one point go to the local town, it’s hardly presented in such a simple way and in any case his time in town is a brief snippet of the entire film.
Like a number of films I’ve seen in the last few years, particularly from South America, it feels like a film that is blending documentary and ethnography with drama. Like the Surinamese film Stones Have Laws, it feels more like a creative collaboration with an indigenous tribe to tell their own story in a filmic way, and it captures a sense of how life and death are intertwined, by presenting dialogues between the living and the dead (or, as the title might have it, between “the dead and the others”). There is thus an oneiric quality to many of the scenes, particularly the night-time ones, where simple relationships (and narratives about them) break down a little.
Just at a basic compositional level, there is a reliance on extreme long shots for a lot of the scenes, which puts us at a literal remove, as we cannot help but be as film viewers to a remote Brazilian indigenous community. It remains mysterious to the end, and as such can be a rather enigmatic film, but it has a fascinating beauty to it all the same.
CREDITS Directors/Writers João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora; Cinematographer Nader Messora; Starring Henrique Ihjãc Krahô; Length 114 minutes. Seen at home (Mubi streaming), London, Tuesday 21 July 2020.
I’m getting towards the end of my coverage of the 2023 Melbourne International Film Festival, and I’m in South America now. I’ll have a couple of films from elsewhere, but in this post I collect the three Brazilian films, covering quite a range of experiences of the country. Two of them are documentaries, and the third is a fiction feature.
Pictures of Ghosts (2023). This is largely a documentary by Kleber Mendonça Filho (the director behind Aquarius) which deals with his life growing up in Recife, his relationship to its cinemas, and then a long disquisition on these lost cinemas, placing them in relation both to his own life but also that of the country and its volatile political situation. There are three broad chapters and it ends with a fictional coda to pull its title and themes together rather nicely. There is of course, as there is with any film that deals with loss (here, loss of cinematic history), a certain sadness that pervades the film, but I think it’s nicely balanced by Filho’s voiceover, these movements in life not perhaps being final or finished but the lingering sense of phantoms that can continue to be given life through art.
The Buriti Flower (2023). Seems as if this pair of directors are committed to stories of Brazil’s indigenous people, judging from their previous film I’d seen (The Dead and the Others, which of course I saw on Mubi because that’s where you see that kind of film, and I’m sure in time this one will show up there too). There are clearly a lot of these stories to tell, too, given the huge size and diversity of the country, though the contours are familiar from American, Canadian, Australian and other such stories of encounters with colonialist forces. This takes the ever popular hybrid documentary-fiction format, limning that divide with a deft blend of myth and legend, ritual practice, tribal life, evocations of traumatic history (displacement from land by violent settlers), and ends with protest at the nation’s capital on behalf of all indigenous populations against the government of Bolsonaro. Given all these different strands and registers, it does a good job in finding a heart for this story, which is in a family, with events often seen through the eyes of their young girl, though it doesn’t limit itself to that. It’s all pretty evocative, even poetic and beautiful when it wants to be.
Charcoal (2022). I’m pretty sure when you watch films intensively within a festival context, you so desperately want to like and admire something that you end up overrating any number of films. This Brazilian film, set in a small rural location, is exactly the kind of thing I’m probably likely to overrate. It’s a black comedy (not laugh-out-loud funny to my mind, but certainly operating at a bleakly amusing level) about a woman who lives a subsistence life in a small town with her husband, whose father has had a stroke and is ailing, and who comes to an arrangement with a local nurse that sees her take in a guest. I’d say this is where hilarity ensues, but of course it’s not that simple, and there’s a lot of tension created around the random guests who drop by while the new guest is staying, along with a few little twists that add to the frisson of absurdity.
CREDITS
Retratos Fantasmas (Pictures of Ghosts, 2023) — Director/Writer Kleber Mendonça Filho; Cinematographer Pedro Sotero; Length 93 minutes. Seen at ACMI, Melbourne, Friday 4 August 2023.
Crowrã (The Buriti Flower, 2023) [Brazil/Portugal] — Directors Renée Nader Messora and João Salaviza; Writers Nader Messora, Salaviza and Henrique Ihjãc Krahô; Cinematographer Nader Messora; Length 123 minutes. Seen at ACMI, Melbourne, Sunday 6 August 2023.
Carvão (Charcoal, 2022) [Brazil/Argentina, classification 15] — Director/Writer Carolina Markowicz; Cinematographer Pepe Mendes; Starring Maeve Jinkings, César Bordón, Jean de Almeida Costa; Length 107 minutes. Seen at Kino, Melbourne, Thursday 10 August 2023.
I’m not sure is this is the best of Pedro Costa’s three films grouped together as the “Fontainhas trilogy” after the Lisbon slum/shanty town where they take place, but after spending so much time with these characters in this place, its quiet reflectiveness feels the richest, perhaps because of that time spent. Costa too has developed his video aesthetic that he began with In Vanda’s Room, recapturing some of the painterly contrast that was at play in the first of the three (Ossos) but without the conventions of the narrative. The characters are still slouching around going nowhere, interspersed with the tall and elegant elderly man Ventura narrating a letter to someone long gone it seems. and there’s not much in the way of plot to speak of, but it swaps out the crumbling buildings of the previous films for the new apartments built in their place, which have a sort of antiseptic quality, though there’s still plenty enough places for Costa to find his crepuscular shadows. I can’t really explain too much why I like it, but it’s an experience that just needs to sort of wash over you, and at that level I find it rewarding.
CREDITS Director/Writer Pedro Costa; Cinematographers Costa and Leonardo Simões; Starring Ventura, Vanda Duarte; Length 156 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Saturday 12 March 2022 (and I’m fairly sure I saw it a cinema in London, probably the ICA, back in around 2007, but I don’t have a record of it).
As a film this is certainly a follow-up to Pedro Costa’s 1997 film Ossos, sharing a lot of the same characters (or maybe they’re real life figures: the term “docufiction” is applied and it’s impossible to know where the boundaries lie), and stylistically we have all these dark, derelict spaces beautifully framed and lit, captured by Costa’s camera, largely fixed in place. However, it’s also quite different, not just in taking in an expansive running time, but in embracing then relatively new digital video technology. There’s a notable degradation to the image compared to Ossos, but this is formally matched to the setting, which itself is a rough, broken area of housing being literally torn down as we watch and as these characters try to live their lives. Drugs are a major part of coping, and watching Vanda and her friends shooting up, sniffing and otherwise ingesting drugs is part of the texture of the film, not a moral lesson so much as just a through line to their misery. Not much happens in some senses, and this is where watching on a big screen, in the captive experience of a cinema, would undoubtedly have improved it for me. As it was, my attention strayed but never for too long, and Costa proves himself adept at capturing something remarkable about these lives.
CREDITS Director/Writer/Cinematographer Pedro Costa; Starring Vanda Duarte; Length 171 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Saturday 26 February 2022.
I can’t fully pretend to be able to tell apart the characters in this film by Pedro Costa, which kicks off his so-called Fontainhas trilogy (being the films set in the downmarket area of Lisbon where migrants from former colonies have tended to cluster together). Nor am I entirely sure of their relationships to one another. However, Costa’s filmmaking is absolutely clear in finding perfect images to capture the essence of this neighbourhood and of the squalor in which the characters live. Not quite dim and unlit as his later films, there’s still a palpable sense of chiaroscuro to the contrasts in these interiors, as characters with equally murky intentions move through them (a young mother, a feckless father, some others who are trying to do good to little avail). Every shot here has a careful and palpable beauty to it, even as the characters themselves seem unable to express themselves and keep trying to find a way out of a certain sense of hopelessness. It feels like a move towards his modern style of filmmaking.
CREDITS Director/Writer Pedro Costa; Cinematographer Emmanuel Machuel; Starring Vanda Duarte, Nuno Vaz; Length 98 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 20 February 2022.
Like the recent boxset on Rossellini’s War Trilogy, this trilogy of films by Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa also have a documentary quality, being set in ruined areas dealing with broken people trying to put their lives together, and largely using non-professional actors and people found in the location. That said, Costa’s style is far more deliberate and carefully-composed I think, and there’s a hue to the haunting, chiaroscuro images that recalls contemporary art gallery work. Here, Costa’s figures struggle to make themselves seen in the half-light of the settings in the downtrodden neighbourhood of Fontainhas in Lisbon, as stories of migrants from former colonial possessions and those cast off by society criss-cross in these films. All three feature some of Costa’s most favoured non-actors, like Vanda Duarte in the first two, Ossos (1997) and In Vanda’s Room (2000), and the mononymous Ventura in the third, Colossal Youth (2006), an actor with whom he has continued to work in more recent features like Horse Money and Vitalina Varela.
Getting back into my Global Cinema strand, which involves me paraphrasing the Wikipedia entries for the country and cinema, along with a review of a film so apologies if that seems lazy. I am hoping it helps me learn about the world. Anyway, the country I’m covering today has always been known in English as Cape Verde, but they prefer Cabo Verde (even in English) so that’s the name I’ll use for the rest of this article. Pedro Costa has dealt with Cabo Verdeans in a number of his films, but there are also some good local films like this one (a co-production with Portugal and Brazil). I’m very worried now about my next visit, which is to the Central African Republic, but I’ll cross that bridge soon.
Republic of Cabo Verde (República de Cabo Verde aka Cape Verde) population 484,000 | capital Praia (128k, on Santiago island) | largest cities Praia, Mindelo (70k), Santa Maria (24k), Assomada (12k), Porto Novo (9k) | area 4,033 km2 | religion Christianity (85%, mostly Catholic), none (11%) | official language Portuguese (português) with Cape Verdean Creole (kriol) also recognised | major ethnicity not officially recorded but mostly mixed ethnicity | currency Cape Verdean escudo ($) [CVE] | internet .cv
An archipelago and island country in the Atlantic Ocean, comprising 10 islands starting from 600km west of the Cap-Vert peninsula in Senegal, part of the Macaronesia ecoregion. The name comes from the peninsula which itself takes its name from the Portuguese for “green cape”, a name given to it by explorers in the mid-15th century. There was no indigenous population but first became populated by the Portuguese in the 15th century, who used it as a convenient location as part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the 16th century onwards. The earliest settlement Ribeira Grande (now called Cidade Velha) was sacked by Francis Drake amongst others, and Praia became capital in 1770. The decline in the slave trade led to an economic crisis, though ship resupplying continued to be important. Growing nationalism in the mid-20th century led to Amílcar Cabral organising the secret PAIGC for the liberation of Portuguese Guinea and Cape Verde, which was followed by armed rebellion and then war in Guinea, which culminated in independence there and then in 1975 for Cabo Verde. A one-party state ceded to multi-party elections in 1991, and the country is now a stable democracy.
Cinema on the archipelago dates back to the early-20th century and naturally still has a lot of ties with Portugal. The first cinema was established in 1922 and there are now two film festivals. A number of films by Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa have been set on the island (such as Casa de lava) or amongst expatriate communities of Cabo Verdeans in Portugal, but a handful of native filmmaking efforts have been made over the years, fiction features as well as documentaries.
Djon África (2018). This is a very thoughtful film about displacement and belonging, about the lingering effects of a colonial past on a present population, left disconnected from culture and family in profound ways. At the same time it’s a rather likeable film about a young man (Miguel Moreira) who has grown up in Portugal, who’s grifting and getting by, doing some petty thievery and with a girlfriend, but who finds himself drawn to find out something about his father. And so he travels to Cabo Verde, where his dad is from, in the hope of finding him and somehow forging some meaningful connection. His journey takes him around the islands, from the capital Praia to some small towns, and like a lot of road movies, it’s actually a voyage of self-discovery and so there are very few words I could choose to describe this that don’t make it sound like nauseating sentimental nonsense (“he finds out the real meaning of family” or “by facing up to what it means to not be from any place, he discovers where he’s actually from” or something), but actually it’s perfectly judged. It limns the divide between documentary—presenting this man in a world he’s only just discovering, which to a certain extent was the actual lived reality of the actor playing this role, and really conveying the textures of this country—alongside a fictional narrative. The scenes are scripted, and there’s also a febrile sense of the magical or the nightmarish that crops up every so often, blurring distinctions between lived reality and hallucination, and yet it still feels natural and at times improvised. For all that it’s very conscious and thoughtful about its process, though, it never sacrifices naturalism to formal rigours, and retains throughout a loping forward momentum.
CREDITS Directors João Miller Guerra and Filipa Reis; Writers Miller Guerra and Pedro Pinho; Cinematographer Vasco Viana; Starring Miguel Moreira, Isabel Cardoso; Length 98 minutes. Seen at the ICA, London, Friday 16 August 2019.
If you watch enough Netflix you will of course plumb some fairly murky depths when it comes to mediocre filmmaking. And because I’m trying to fill out this themed week, here’s one of them. It’s not one I chose myself, it was watched with a group of friends (well, online not in the same room), but there you go, I did watch it. I cannot in all honesty recommend it to you.
I think a more accurate title would be “So My Granddaughter’s a Homophobe” given how relatively little time is spent on the grandmas (who are obviously the most interesting characters). This has its moments, most of which appear to be a sort of anodyne Almodóvar, but it hardly does itself any favours with the terrible young people and the bad Scottish accents. It is clearly aiming to keep things light and fluffy, and I do think its heart is in the right place, but it is a bit wayward at times.
CREDITS Director/Writer Ángeles Reiné; Cinematographer José Luis Alcaine; Starring Rosa Maria Sardà, Verónica Forqué, Ingrid García-Jonsson; Length 94 minutes. Seen at home (Netflix streaming), Wellington, Friday 5 February 2021.
This film was at the 2019 London Film Festival, where a lot of people I know and like had already seen it and fallen in love. At festivals I try to prioritise films I don’t expect to come back to cinemas, but that also sometimes means a bit of a wait, and 2020 in general will probably mean I don’t see some classics for a year or two yet. Pedro Costa’s got its cinema release while I was on holiday, and by the time I got back, we were into lockdown, so I belatedly caught up with on Mubi. Home viewing doesn’t really seem the ideal way to experience Costa’s frequently very darkly-lit pieces, but it turns out the power was still very evident, making this easily one of my favourites.
For whatever reason, I found it difficult to get into Horse Money, Pedro Costa’s last film in 2014, but I think part of it is just down to how tired you are when you watch them (and I was very tired), because they have a curiously oneiric/soporific quality, falling somewhere in between wakefulness and lucid dreaming (I’m reminded a little of the tone of Lucrecia Martel’s films also, although stylistically they are quite different). The frame in any given shot within a Costa movie is frequently dominated by heavy shadows, with the encroaching darkness that looms from the edges of the frame suggesting both a lingering mood and the difficulty characters have in moving forward. This film starts with a death, telegraphed through glimpsed items, characters posed in mourning, a bloodied pillow and sheets suggestive of trauma, and it’s into this that the title character arrives, the wife of the recently deceased (picking up on a story told in the earlier film). The darkness of the frames is matched to the decrepitude of the dwelling places, mud and dirt, a broken roof, a sense of society in collapse—this is Portugal, though the characters all come from Cape Verde off the coast of Africa, and colonialism seems to be an unspoken backdrop to the drama. It’s slow cinema, of course, reminding me of similar imagery (albeit more waterlogged) in Tsai Ming-liang‘s films, but if you’re attuned to it—and I felt more so here than the last time I watched a Costa film—it feels rewarding too.
CREDITS Director/Writer Pedro Costa; Cinematographer Leonardo Simões; Starring Vitalina Varela, Ventura; Length 124 minutes. Seen at home (Mubi), London, Wednesday 17 June 2020.
Day seven of the London Film Festival, and aside from being my birthday it was a day of just two films, both of which were fairly decent as films go, if rather earnest, but both of which shone a light on their respective countries in quite revealing ways. Being directed by women, they had lessons particularly about the role and status of women in Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh.
The Perfect Candidate (2019). This is a film about a highly-educated young woman in Saudi Arabia (Maryam, played by Mila Al Zahrani) who—for various rather overcomplicated plot reasons to do with the palpably unfair bureaucracy surrounding the rights of women (she can’t travel because her legal guardian, her father, didn’t fill out the right forms in the right way)—ends up running as a local municipal political candidate. At this point it follows certain fairly clear generic guidelines, but the will-she-won’t-she-win aspect of the narrative is very much downplayed (the final results are almost an aside) because this is about a woman who is trying to make change happen in a place where such change is greatly resisted. There’s a sense of tension throughout as you wonder whether something terrible is about to happen just around the corner, but this retains a fundamentally hopeful idea about progress told from the perspective of those who have a certain privilege, even as it fairly forthrightly calls out some of the more arcane rules that are designed to police relationships between the sexes. It’s fairly programmatic as a film, but there are some fine, sparky performances from the leads, and it’s likeable (like the director’s pioneering debut film Wadjda).
Made in Bangladesh (2019). Reminiscent a little perhaps of Made in Dagenham (2010), with which it shares a very similar name, this is a drama about women working in sweatshop conditions trying to organise a labour union. This is of course a good and a noble thing, and honestly it’s always great to see it done, but the film itself can feel a little bit simplistic in the way the drama unfolds. It follows Shimu (Rikita Nandini Shimu), who seems to be the most educated among her group of early-20-something friends. They work in a garment factory, but after the death of a work colleague in a fire, followed by the continued recalcitrance of the management to pay in a timely way for work done, Shimu decides to take action when she’s approached by an NGO worker. Having informed her of her rights under law, the NGO seems to largely disappear from the film, as Shimu must forge her own path to finding her rights, battling against an aged Bangladeshi bureaucracy (one particularly memorable shot is of an office worker’s room piled high with ancient bundles of documents). It’s a film of colour and joy even amongst the endless disheartenment brought on by the exploitative working conditions, damaging patriarchal control, and a narrative which seems to be inevitably heading towards defeat.
CREDITS
المرشحة المثالية Al-Murassaha al-Mithaliyya (The Perfect Candidate, 2019) [Saudi Arabia/Germany] — Director Haifaa al-Mansour هيفاء المنصور; Writers al-Mansour and Brad Niemann; Cinematographer Patrick Orth; Starring Mila Al Zahrani ميلا الزهراني, Nora Al Awadh نورة العوض; Length 101 minutes. Seen at Vue West End, London, Tuesday 8 October 2019.
মেড ইন বাংলাদেশ (Made in Bangladesh, 2019) [Bangladesh/France/Denmark/Portugal] — Director Rubaiyat Hossain রুবাইয়াত হোসেন; Writers Hossain and Philippe Barrière; Cinematographer Sabine Lancelin; Starring Rikita Nandini Shimu রিকিতা নন্দীনি শিমু, Novera Rahman; Length 92 minutes. Seen at BFI Southbank (NFT2), London, Tuesday 8 October 2019.
filmcentric 