Nelson Cavaquinho
A documentary on the career of Beth Carvalho, the Brazilian singer who became a well known samba legend from the 1970s onwards, edited together from hundreds of hours of footage and audio files kept (and partially recorded) by Carvalho herself during her lifetime.
Based on Gertrude Stein’s eponymously named screenplay, written in 1929 as European fascism was building momentum. Beatrice Gibson’s adaptation, set almost a century later in contemporary Paris, deploys Stein’s script as a talismanic guide through a contemporary moment of comparable social and political unrest. An original soundtrack, written especially for the film by British composer Laurence Crane, responds to the repetition, duplication and duality at play in Stein’s script. Both a fictional thriller and an act of collective representation, Deux Soeurs proposes empathy and friendship as means to reckon with an increasingly turbulent present.
Two contrasting social groups get in touch: three architects and three street urchins, all struggling for survival.
Renowned Brazilian samba singer-songwriter Nelson Cavaquinho performing at TV Cultura in 1973.
A short film of lovely poetic, observational elements and interviews with the famed samba singer/songwriter Nelson Antônio da Silva, whose adopted last name ‘Cavaquinho’ refers to the small guitar-like instrument that he played and used to compose his songs.
