Beginning with the arrival by canoe of a TV and VCR in their village, The Spirit of TV documents the emotions and thoughts of the Waiãpi as they first encounter their own TV images and those of others. They view a tape from their chief’s first trip to Brasilia to speak to the government, news broadcasts, and videos on other Brazilian native peoples. The tape translates the opinions of individual Waiãpi on the power of images, the diversity of native peoples, and native peoples’ common struggles with federal agents, goldminers, trappers and loggers.
Tag: BRAZIL
A fictional account of Orson Welles’ real passage to Brazil where he was supposed to film a cultural film called “It’s All True”, to present a positive image of Brazilian people and the country’s grandiosity’s to the U.S. government, a project that was part of FDR’s Good Neighbor policy. But Welles got enchanted with everything around him and got distracted from the project, that never got fully made. This movie speculates what really happened to Welles that prevented him from fulfilling his work.
Marcello Rondi is a very rich Brazilian who is found dying in his apartment. Her daughter Berenice is not convinced that it is a heart attack, and she begins to investigate the matter.
Edson is having an affair with actress Maria do Rosário, who dreams of being a movie director. So he tries to get some easy money for her film, but is arrested and meets a police torturer instead.
Winner of the Bronze Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival, Ozualdo R. Candeias masterpiece A OPÇÃO OU AS ROSAS DA ESTRADA combines masterful handheld documentary camerawork in black and white with staged action based on firsthand experiences to delve into the profoundly quotidian reality of a group of rural women who cut sugar cane and live modestly in ramshackle neighborhoods along the highway. Dreaming of a better life and with no other option than prostitution, many of them hit the road towards the big city, where new forms of exploitation awaits them.
The third installment in the Coffin Joe Trilogy, The Awakening of the Beast, follows Coffin Joe’s sadistic experiments on four drug addicts who volunteer to take LSD. The experiments are intended to prove that drug use is related to sexual depravity. Director José Mojica Marins once again plays Coffin Joe, who sits with a panel of psychiatrists on a television show, using videos of the addicts as proof of the connection between drugs and lewd sexual behavior.
The day that Pier Paolo Pasolini was killed, Glauber Rocha decided to make this film about the life of Christ in the Third World. Starting from a dialectical synthesis between capitalism and socialism, and a search of interracial relationships in Brazil, Rocha created a work of religious and prophetic tone that results in a kind of bewilderment contemplative, now lyrical, now frantic, soaked in a new messianism. In his last film, the director proposed a tune of sounds and images that build a picture of Brazil and a portrait of himself.