MIFF 2023: Films from Brazil

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.

Bacurau (2019)

Everything being well, this is a film I should have seen in a cinema two weeks ago, but I returned from holiday on Friday 13th, just on the cusp of the COVID-19 crisis, and sticking around in a central London cinema didn’t seem particularly sensible, and would increasingly seem less so up until the point cinemas closed a few days later. Well, it’s on Mubi now, where everyone can watch it—and I might add, without wishing to become some kind of sponsored content, that for UK viewers they currently have a deal to get three months for £1 so you have no excuse if you want to see this and some of the other films I’ve written about (there are also seasons dedicated to Jean-Pierre Melville, Park Chan-wook, Jean-Luc Godard, not to mention new films by filmmakers I don’t know yet but soon will). Mendonça Filho’s debut film Neighbouring Sounds, the one he made before Aquarius, is also there, and I feel like that’ll be another one I’ll check out soon.

There is no shortage of art dealing with the sometimes brutal intersection between the fast pace of modernity and traditional communities usually left unsupported by government and big business. In a sense, that’s what this film is dealing with, using a sort of generic template that traces its lineage back to The Most Dangerous Game or alternatively to 60s acid westerns (there is some ingestion of psychotropic drugs towards the end, but it’s not filmed in a trippy way). The first half of the film is about the little titular village in the outback of Brazil, tracing the family dynamics and the local life, which has been upturned by the death of one of its elder citizens.

Right from the start there are these little clues towards the upheavals to come, such as the way the town has disappeared from Google maps, and the arrival of a mayoral candidate from a (disliked) local town sparks the ire of the locals, who are very efficient at hiding themselves away in a hurry (this becomes a plot point later on). Thus when Udo Kier and his gang of ne’er-do-wells arrives on the scene, we’re primed for something odd to happen and things slide downhill pretty quick, as the body count racks up. It’s brutal and gory in its way, but it’s also a film that’s angry about governments and about technology and about Western capitalism and probably also pretty angry about Bolsonaro and his ilk. And it’s an anger that will probably percolate for a while through the cinema of many nations now finding themselves perched precariously on the edge of this kind of rapacious economic system.

CREDITS
Directors/Writers Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles; Cinematographer Pedro Sotero; Starring Bárbara Colen, Thomas Aquino, Silvero Pereira, Udo Kier, Sônia Braga; Length 132 minutes. Seen at home (Mubi streaming), London, Thursday 26 March 2020.

Aquarius (2016)

For a film that’s been controversial in its native country (though I gather it’s more to do with politics external to the film itself), and for one with an 18 certificate, this isn’t quite what I expected. Primarily it’s that the tone is so unhurried, and lacking in melodrama. It’s a quiet film that takes its time to observe the elderly Clara as she lives her life by the beach in an upscale area of Recife. Recounting the plot (her desire to stay where she is leads to conflict with the building’s owners, who want to redevelop the site) suggests a kind of film that this really isn’t. Through this pleasant miasmatic haze of beachfront living there are periodic little breaks—tiny brief shots that jolt the audience: a body being disinterred, a baby which has messed itself being cleaned, some graphic sex—but these are just hints at the direction perhaps a flashier more insecure director might have gone. This is a character study, and a very fine one.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Kleber Mendonça Filho; Cinematographers Pedro Sotero and Fabricio Tadeu; Starring Sônia Braga; Length 140 minutes. Seen at Curzon Bloomsbury, London, Wednesday 29 March 2017.