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.
At the top of South America is the country of Colombia, best known in the west for its involvement in the drug trade, and indeed that’s what underpins the film I’ve chosen, though it weaves in some of the indigenous history and culture of the country as well. Still, I’ve already seen and reviewed here a number of Colombian films, whether small scale indie works such as those by Lina Rodríguez or Gente de bien, or rather bigger pictures like Monos. The film I’m covering today was (co-)directed by Ciro Guerra, who made Embrace of the Serpent, a fine film that also deals with indigenous culture (although Guerra himself has somewhat had a cloud around him in recent years due to abuse allegations).
Republic of Colombia (República de Colombia) population 49,336,000 | capital Bogotá (8m) | largest cities Bogotá, Medellín (2.6m), Cali (2.2m), Barranquilla (1.2m), Cartagena (915k) | area 1,141,748 km2 | religion Catholicism (70%), other Christianity (17%), none (11%) | official language Spanish (español colombiano) | major ethnicity mestizo/white (88%), Afro-Colombian (7%) | currency peso ($) [COP] | internet .co
A mostly South American country, although it has a small insular regions (including some islands) in the North, straddling both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Its name comes from the navigator Christopher Columbus, originally adopted for the Republic succeeding the Viceroyalty of New Granada, and taking in much of northern South America. It formed a corridor for early human civilisation, and the first settled indigenous people date back to around 12,500 BCE. By the first millennium BCE, a settled agrarian society had been developed by Amerindian groups including the Muisca, whose Confederation in the Andean highlands dates to around 1450 CE. Shortly after this, in the late-15th century, the first Spanish explorers started to arrive, with Santa Marta in 1525 being the first stable colonial settlement on the continent. From there, Quesada led an early interior exploration, founding Santa Fe (later Bogotá) in 1538. Conquistadors made alliances with natives and continued expansion, with the capital initially being at Lima (as the Viceroyalty of Peru), before moving to Bogotá (as capital of New Granada). Slaves from Africa were also introduced around this time. The influence of Haiti inspired an independence movement under Simón Bolívar, who as part of the wider region broke away from Spain on 20 July 1810 (still celebrated as Colombian independence day), which took over a decade to fully establish. Gran Colombia began to dissolve in the 1820s, and the modern state became the first constitutional government on the continent, abolishing slavery in 1851. US involvement in canal building led to the separation of Panama in 1903, and a period of relative peace was broken by La Violencia after WW2. Various low-level conflicts involving guerrillas (including FARC) have continued over the years since, abetted by the US and various multinationals. A new constitution in 1991 established a democratic republic with three branches of government, and a President in charge of the executive.
Cinema in the country began in 1897, with the arrival of the first Cinématographe, though the Thousand Days’ War of 1899–1902 hampered any production. There was some silent filmmaking, but very few feature films were made until the 1970s. There is now a fairly healthy cinema scene, with hundreds of screens, a number of film festivals, and 20-30 new features each year.
Birds of Passage (2018). This film is drawn to the visually eye-catching, much of which revolves around the tribal practices of the Wayuu people, from whose community both of the central figures are drawn. Indeed the opening scene (and much of the film’s advertising and poster art) details a rather colourful courtship ritual between Zaida (Natalia Reyes) and Rapayet (José Acosta). The drama, then, comes from the conflict of their values with those of the Western world, though not in any kind of simple tribal = good, Western = bad way, but rather the way that their own attitude towards revenge and the taking of life becomes the means by which their downfall is assured. The resulting conflict starts to take on a tragic dimension (in the stage bound sense) as the bodies start to pile up.
Revisiting the film on a second watch two years after the first, I feel perhaps I was a little harsh towards it originally. Perhaps in retrospect I was a little wrong-footed, believing it to be more of an indigenous family drama. It is that, as two families take up arms against one another, but very much in a fallen world—a tribal council of elders basically rules that both these warring families have fallen short of the ways of their people and essentially excommunicates them for being no better than alijunas (non-tribal people, not to be trusted). Of course, it was capitalism that pushed them down this path—an early scene with a group of American peace corps students in the late-60s catalyses this (though the point is never really dwelt upon): their desire for weed pushes our anti-hero into supplying it, thus both creating his fortune and also sealing his fate.
The way the film uses its widescreen vistas is elegant, and the storylines have an almost mythic quality to them—Shakespearean some might say, though this feels more the world of Scarface and many Mafia films. Certainly when the cocky young Leonidas gets involved, you know things aren’t going to go well. It’s a film that plays only with the grandest themes, but it plays those well.
CREDITS
Pájaros de verano (Birds of Passage, 2018) — Directors Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra; Writers Maria Camila Arias and Jacques Toulemonde Vidal; Cinematographer David Gallego; Starring Carmiña Martínez, Natalia Reyes, José Acosta, Jhon Narváez; Length 125 minutes. Seen at Curzon Bloomsbury, London, Sunday 12 May 2019, and at the Embassy, Wellington, Monday 8 March 2021.
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.
Trenque Lauquen (2022). Director Laura Citarella collaborated with lead actor Laura Paredes over a decade ago on her debut Ostende but there’s a still a sense of being obsessed with people doing nothing (after a fashion) or about the qualities of boredom, because this very much more mature work is in twelve chapters over two halves that run for over four hours. It’s a film about storytelling (like La flor, which Citarella and Paredes were also deeply involved in making), frantically weaving plots and sub-plots of mystery and confusion while a romance seems to be unfolding—in the present as well as in the past—between two unassuming characters who seem to want to figure out their town’s mysteries. They travel about, they tell each other secrets, they learn things from study, and they talk talk talk until there’s no more talk. The film shifts to a beguiling widescreen aspect ratio, situating its lead character in a wilderness, and when the storytelling has finished where do we go? These existential mysteries are the ones that the film is ultimately most interested in, but it’s about the journey as much as anything else.
The Eternal Memory (2023). Of course this is a film about a man suffering with Alzheimer’s, about his devoted wife and the love they share for one another, the difficulties both of them have during this period, exacerbated by COVID cutting them off from everyone. It’s about that, because the relationship between actress and government minister Paulina Urrutia and her older husband, veteran journalist (and it turns out, bit-part actor in a Raul Ruiz film, delightfully), Augusto Gongora—who died earlier this year—is at the heart of the film. But it’s also about Chile itself, during 17 years of military dictatorship, and then the thirty-something years since that ended, a history that Gongora lived through and wrote about, and which he addresses in words attached to his book The Forbidden Memory (or something to that effect), which seem to address both Chile’s past, but also his own, its future but ultimately the pain of his endless present. I think too of the title of a Patricio Guzmán documentary I saw years ago, called Chile, the Obstinate Memory and clearly it seems that remembering the past and believing in a future has long been a problem for its people, and it’s one that this film addresses, through the personal lives of its protagonists, whose work ties them into a tradition of struggle and change that’s fascinating in itself. It can be heart-breaking at times, but it’s a beautiful work.
CREDITS
Trenque Lauquen (2022) [Argentina/Germany] — Director Laura Citarella; Writers Citarella and Laura Paredes; Cinematographer Agustín Mendilaharzu; Starring Laura Paredes, Ezequiel Pierri, Rafael Spregelburd; Length 260 minutes (in two parts). Seen at ACMI, Melbourne, Saturday 5 August 2023.
La memoria infinita (The Eternal Memory, 2023) [Chile] — Director/Writer Maite Alberdi; Cinematographer Pablo Valdés; Length 84 minutes. Seen at Kino, Melbourne, Wednesday 16 August 2023.
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.
Chilean cinema has been through periods of strength over the years, and there have been some notable international talents that have flourished after early starts in Chile, like the prolificRaúl Ruiz and veteran documentarian Patricio Guzmán (who made the epic The Battle of Chile). Modern filmmaking has continued to flourish under a new vanguard of directors, both of features (like the excellent Too Late to Die Young by Dominga Sotomayor, or No by Pablo Larraín) and documentaries like the one covered below. This personal story should be viewed alongside a wider overview of the events of Allende’s overthrow (as in Guzmán’s epic three-part film mentioned above), but it gives a different perspective on such an important modern figure.
Republic of Chile (República de Chile) population 17,574,000 | capital Santiago (5.4m) though the legislature is based in Valparaíso | largest cities Santiago, Valparaíso (804k), Concepción (666k), La Serena (296k), Antofagasta (285k) | area 756,096 km2 | religion Christianity (63%), none (36%) | official language Spanish (español chileno) | major ethnicity (estimates) white (64%), mestizos (35%), Amerindians (5%) | currency Chilean peso ($) [CLP] | internet .cl
The southernmost country in the world occupies a narrow stretch of land (64km at its narrowest) between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean, covering a huge number variety of landscapes and climates, and controlling a number of island groups including Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and the Juan Fernández Islands. Its name is theorised to come variously from the name of a tribal chief via the Incas, or from an indigenous word meaning “ends of the earth” or the Mapuche for “where the land ends” or the Quechua for “cold”. There is evidence for some human presence in southern Chile 18,500 years ago, though more permanent settlements date back 10,000 years. The Incan empire briefly extended into the northern area of modern Chile, but the Mapuche in the south resisted successfully, ending with the Battle of the Maule in the late-15th century. Magellan was the first European to set foot in 1520, and more Spaniards (including Pizarro’s lieutenant Pedro de Valdivia, who founded Santiago) followed in the mid-16th century, annexing it for its fertile central valley. Mapuche insurrections (including one resulting in Valdivia’s death) persisted into the 17th century until the Spanish abolished slavery in 1683. Independence from Spain was proclaimed on 18 September 1810 (the date commemorated annually in its National Day); war followed, but a final victory over royalists thanks to Bernardo O’Higgins and José de San Martín came eight years later, though society remained largely unchanged. Territory expansion followed, entrenching landowner and rich financial interests, and it wasn’t until the 1920s that a reformist president was elected. Coups and instability followed for much of the rest of the century, most notably to depose Socialist Salvador Allende in 1973 with the help of the USA. The military leadership of Augusto Pinochet was not toppled until 1989 and democracy was restored, with an elected president having a term of four years.
The earliest film screening in Chile took place in 1902 and the first feature was made in 1910, though the industry struggled for much of the 20th century. A “New Chilean Cinema” developed in the late-60s under directors like Raúl Ruiz and Miguel Littín, but a slump took place during the Pinochet years. New directors like Pablo Larraín and Sebastián Lelio have emerged in recent years.
Beyond My Grandfather Allende (2015). This is a somewhat different proposition from most documentary films made by someone about their own family. It’s not that the family story is lacking in incident or drama: the filmmaker’s grandfather Salvador was the socialist president of Chile, deposed by military coup in 1973 and who committed suicide rather than be taken, and his family was an illustrious one which continues to be filled with politicians and nationally influential people. Rather, what marks it out is the way that nobody the filmmaker talks to, not her mother Isabel, nor aunt Carmen, nor grandmother (Salvador’s wife, “Tencha”, who died while the film was being made), nor even her cousins will open up about Salvador, called by his nickname “Chicho” throughout the film. Perhaps it’s his suicide (which turns out to have been how her other aunt and another family member departed), or the enormous emotional trauma his downfall had on all of them, but to have this emptiness at the heart of a story can be a difficult one to overcome, for the audience. I think the filmmaker Marcia handles it well, though, and from the documentary and filmic evidence, you get a little hint of how Chicho was in life (the film is less concerned with his political legacy), but throughout all of it there’s this sense of a story only half-told.
CREDITS
Allende, mi abuelo Allende (Beyond My Grandfather Allende, 2015) — Director Marcia Tambutti Allende; Writers Allende, Paola Castillo, Bruni Burres and Valeria Vargas; Cinematographer David Bravo and Eduardo Cruz-Coke; Length 90 minutes. Seen at home (Mubi streaming), London, Saturday 19 May 2018.
The first time I saw Steven Soderbergh’s magnum opus, his enormous two-part biopic/investigation of Argentine doctor Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s revolutionary life, I think I must have been a bit underwhelmed. In retrospect it’s probably significantly to the film’s benefit that it avoids the preachiness of most Hollywood biopics, and certainly avoids some of the moralising traps of other Soderbergh films. It’s hardly a revolutionary picture itself, though, and feels overly interested in pastiching period news footage in the scenes from NYC in 1964, with grainy black-and-white, off-centre close-up framings, nervous handheld camerawork and on-screen captions that mimic exactly the font of those old burned-in subtitles you used to see in footage. In other words, you wonder at times if it was more about the technical challenge than capturing the man, and certainly contemporaneous accounts invested a lot in the digital technology Soderbergh was using. But yet at its heart I feel as if this is quite an earnest project. Guevara isn’t the hero of the kind you see on the famous poster images, but just a man amongst many others (and women, too, as we see in the guerrilla armies he forms and leads) trying to make a positive change to a country mired in corruption, no thanks to US involvement. Soderbergh is hardly interested in digging deep into the politics, but just by focusing on Guevara, Castro and the others there’s a gentle sense of solidarity with those holding these revolutionary ideals and the dream of a future forged in training camps in the jungles and skirmishes on the streets.
Moving on a few years for the second half of this epic, it’s clearly possible to see how it works in tandem with the first part. That film presented revolutionary ideology and practice with the stylistic flash of, say, the contemporary New Wave cinemas of the era, as Guevara worked alongside his fellows in Cuba in the late-1950s, intercut with interviews and speeches at the UN in 1964. This part takes a quite different tack, going for more of a handheld observational style, using a muted colour palette that really downplays the lushness of the highland setting, as Guevara faces up to the reality of the struggle in Bolivia in 1967. If the first was a film about glory, this is a film mostly about disappointment and failure. Its episodic march of time, numbered by the days Guevara has spent in country, sees his people slowly picked off, their deaths really just captured in passing or off-screen, as the action follows increasingly bearded men messing around in the hills, trying to win over the local people and with a mounting sense of desperation. There’s nothing glorious here, but there’s a certain fascination to Che’s resolve, even as he’s battered by asthma and poor discipline from the forces he’s trying to lead. Perhaps by design, but it feels almost underwhelming after the first part, a corrective perhaps but a sad one.
Che: Part One (2008) — Director Steven Soderbergh; Writers Peter Buchman and Benjamin A. van der Veen (based on the non-fiction work Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria cubana “Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War” by Ernesto Guevara); Cinematography Steven Soderbergh [as “Peter Andrews”]; Starring Benicio del Toro, Demián Bichir, Rodrigo Santoro, Julia Ormond; Length 135 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Thursday 13 January 2022 (and earlier on DVD at home, London, sometimes in the early-2010s I imagine).
Che: Part Two (2008) — Director Steven Soderbergh; Writers Peter Buchman and Benjamin A. van der Veen; Cinematography Steven Soderbergh [as “Peter Andrews”]; Starring Benicio del Toro, Franka Potente, Gastón Pauls, Lou Diamond Phillips; Length 136 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Monday 17 January 2022 (and earlier on DVD at home, London, sometimes in the early-2010s I imagine).
Some films are made for film festivals, and none more so than any given new film by Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Some of them have becoming (surprisingly) modest arthouse hits, like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and Memoria is very much in a similar mould, with lush jungle terrains (here in Colombia) and a slow, mysterious narrative that seems to promise both naturalism and also science-fiction and fantasy at times. The central investigation may recall Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, in being based around a mysterious sonic fragment, but there’s little else that recalls mainstream narrative cinema, and Tilda Swinton is looking strangely ordinary here as she searches for… something.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul proves that even making a film largely in English and set in Colombia, he’s still able to make exactly the kinds of films he makes, which is to say slow, somnolent and oblique. As with Cemetery of Splendour I nodded off a little at times (to be fair that one was a film about people with some kind of sleeping sickness), but it felt like part of the artistic process, a durational one, about a woman who seems to be searching for the source of a mysterious sound. That search takes her to various specialists (real or imagined?), and to a small village in the mountains, and those shots of ruins and lush vegetation seem very much of a piece with his most famous works. I think in many ways Memoria extends those themes, with some surprising additions that never exactly serve to make clear what’s been going on, but instead intensify and deepen the mystery. But that’s often the way. This had me fascinated and I loved the slow rhythms of it, but it danced nimbly away from explaining itself. Undoubtedly both this and the pacing will madden many of its potential viewers, but it’s an experience in being open to the possibilities of narrative.
CREDITS Director/Writer Apichatpong Weerasethakul อภิชาติพงศ์ วีระเศรษฐกุล; Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom สยมภู มุกดีพร้อม; Starring Tilda Swinton, Jeanne Balibar, Elkin Díaz; Length 136 minutes. Seen at the Embassy, Wellington, Thursday 18 November 2021.
In a way this film by Costa-Gavras is exemplary of a certain strand of political filmmaking that flourished in the 1980s, finding a way into an epochal event through a human rights case involving (white) Americans, to make it more relatable. Interestingly, of course, the Chilean coup in 1973 that led to the death of the young American journalist Charles Horman (played here by John Shea) is so far in the background that Allende and Pinochet are barely even named, and the Chileans we see are just shady military characters with little to distinguish them.
Costa-Gavras is very much more interested in focusing on the Americans involved, which makes sense given the help they gave to what was an explicitly anti-leftist and militaristic coup, aligning so well with their destabilising influence across Central and South America in this Cold War era. So we are led to see all these events, the disappearance and death of American journalists, as part of an essentially American story of silencing their own citizens as part of enacting geopolitical change that would favour their own national interests.
That said, what I find frustrating about the film is just having to watch Jack Lemmon (playing Charles’s dad Ed) trying to throw his weight around and not understanding his own son’s situation, though it’s all presented as part of a learning curve for him—as someone of a certain age who implicitly trusted his own government finally understanding that he could never trust them again. His character is difficult and has trouble understanding the context, and that can just make him a little bit difficult to watch at times when it’s just variations of him going into rooms and being dismissive of his son’s wife (Sissy Spacek) and friends whenever they speak. Still, it’s a well-intentioned film that did attempt to grapple with some of this geopolitical reality at a time when Reagan had recently been elected.
CREDITS Director Costa-Gavras Κώστας Γαβράς; Writers Costa-Gavras and Donald E. Stewart (based on the non-fiction book The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice by Thomas Hauser); Cinematographer Ricardo Aronovich; Starring Jack Lemmon, Sissy Spacek, John Shea, Melanie Mayron; Length 122 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Saturday 17 July 2021 (and earlier on VHS at home, Wellington, September 2000).
Brazil is the biggest country I’ve yet covered in this series and it has a long and fruitful cinema history. Indeed, Mubi where I watched this film has been curating a ‘new Brazilian cinema’ strand over the last few months that has featured plenty of equally interesting titles and if I weren’t a little pressed for time this week I’d have featured more of those films in the leadup to this review. I certainly do intend to do a Brazilian themed week before too long. However, as the film I’m featuring today is about modern Brazilian politics, it seemed like the best introduction to this huge country.
Federative Republic of Brazil (Brasil) population 210,147,000 | capital Brasília (3.99m) | largest cities São Paulo (21.3m), Rio de Janeiro (12.4m), Belo Horizonte (5.1m), Recife (4m), Brasília | area 8,515,767 km2 | religion Christianity (87%), none (8%) | official language Portuguese (português) | major ethnicity white (47.7%), mixed (43.1%), Black (7.6%) | currency Real (R$) [BRL] | internet .br
The largest South American country is also the world’s fifth largest by area, and sixth largest by population, so needless to say there’s a lot to fit into this paragraph. It borders all other countries on the continent except Ecuador and Chile, with an incredibly diverse geography. The name comes from the Portuguese for Brazilwood (“pau-brasil”), a tree that once grew along the coast, with this part of its name referring to its reddish colour like an ember (from brasa); in the indigenous Guarani language, it is Pindorama, meaning “land of the palm tree”. Evidence of human habitation goes back some 11,000 years, and the earliest pottery found in the west is from the Amazon basin—around 7 million indigenous people lived in the area covered by the modern country by the arrival of the Portuguese, who claimed the land in April 1500. Colonisation began in earnest around 30 years later, and was divided by King John III into 15 autonomous areas before bringing them back together under unified leadership in 1549. There were any number of wars with indigenous people, whose number were added to by the slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa, brought over to work the sugar plantations (slavery continued until 1850). In the early-19th century, Rio de Janeiro hosted the Portuguese royal court for over a decade, unifying the colony with its coloniser across the Atlantic. However, independence was soon after declared on 7 September 1822, resulting in the foundation of the Empire of Brazil, though a series of internal conflicts and political tensions eventually led to its transformation to a republic in 1889, albeit one essentially under military dictatorship. The ensuing century saw a tumultuous push and pull between dictatorship and socialism, with the current trend being back towards authoritarianism. It is a democratic republic with an elected president.
The film industry can be traced back to the late-19th century, though the country’s production didn’t come to prominence until Cinema Novo in the 1960s under directors such as Glauber Rocha and Nelson Pereira dos Santos, with another more commercial peak in the 1990s. There are a number of prominent film festivals and its films continue to be well-regarded by critics.
The Trial (2018). Though I recognise a few of the names, I am by no means acquainted with Brazilian politics. It’s a huge country, with a huge range of experiences, races, class divides and no doubt a range of very specific things that lead to various factions within their political system. This documentary throws you headlong into that without on-screen captions as to who the people we see are, and with only a few intertitles for context, as its first woman President, Dilma Rousseff, faces impeachment for a small number of charges which—depending on your viewpoint, and all of them get voice here—could either be rather minor in the scheme of things and therefore a pretext for a coup, or else evidence of deeper corruption. And aside from Rousseff, a few other major figures (mostly men) are also in the firing line for corruption and criminal charges.
What becomes evident though is that, notwithstanding your familiarity with the specifically Brazilian context, the kinds of political theatre we are accustomed to seeing in all our countries, and the creeping way of the fascist right to turn the electorate against itself, is very familiar. What is also interesting is that aside from Rousseff herself (who is more talked about than actually seen or heard), the impeachment trials and the film itself seems to converge around two other women—though there are no talking heads interviews, so it’s all very much in overheard meetings, brief news clips, press conferences and parliamentary proceedings. These are Janaina Paschoal (a lawyer and prosecutor, subsequently elected as a member of a far right party) and Gleisi Hoffmann, who is in Rousseff’s party and a senator at the time of the trial. Again, without offering overt context, the film allows the viewer to form their own opinion of the various arguments, though Hoffmann feels like a compelling presence at the edges of this show trial.
Anyway, my main point is that though I didn’t know much about Brazil or its politics, this documentary felt compelling and interesting, not just about that country but about democracies, and the propensity for various factions to derail them. I’m not sure that the subsequent election of Jair Bolsonaro allays any of those fears.
CREDITS
O processo (The Trial, 2018) — Director/Writer Maria Augusta Ramos; Cinematographers Alan Schvarsberg and David Alves Mattos; Length 137 minutes. Seen at home (Mubi streaming), London, Thursday 10 September 2020.
The final London Film Festival film I had a chance to watch before getting on a plane to the literal opposite side of the world was this horror chiller from Argentine director Natalia Meta, and it’s pretty effective at what it does.
I remember watching the director Natalia Meta’s first feature Death in Buenos Aires (2014) on a whim on Netflix a few years’ back and I think it’s generally underrated. She shows terrific flair at times in this new film, a dark psychological horror, following Inés (Érica Rivas), a woman who works as a film dubbing artist and who starts to get hallucinations and be driven a little bit insane by people who may be living in her mind, or may not be. It’s not perfect, and I think it meanders a little at times, but when it hits it’s really effective at creating suspenseful shivers. There’s enough really bravura filmmaking and control of tension to make it a really interesting watch.
CREDITS Director Natalia Meta; Writers Meta and Leonel D’Agostino (based on the novel El mal menor “The Lesser Evil” by C.E. Feiling); Cinematographer Bárbara Álvarez; Starring Érica Rivas; Length 90 minutes. Seen at home (BFI Player streaming), London, Monday 12 October 2020.
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