Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Nelson Pereira dos Santos talks about The Highway of Life (1980)
Two years of research and visits to collections, cinematheques and museums; almost seventy interviews that generated 30 hours of recorded material; more than two hundred scanned photos and more than one hundred films watched. In total, more than a thousand hours of work were needed to prepare Brazilian Cinema in the 20th Century. The work is a fascinating journey through all the cinematic cycles that Brazil lived, from the pioneering Belle Époque, through the great studios like Atlântica and Cinédia, Cinema Novo, the urban comedies of the 70's, until the resumption in the late 90's. The documentary is unique, it gives the floor to who really wrote and lived this story intensely.
Cinema Novo is a movie-essay that investigates poetically the most important movement of Latin American cinema, through the thoughts of its main auteurs: Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Glauber Rocha, Leon Hirszman, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Ruy Guerra, Walter Lima Jr., Paulo César Saraceni, amongst others.
Documentary about the life of Tom Jobim, from the perspective of three women of his life: his sister, Helena Jobim, his first wife, Thereza, and his second wife, Ana.
Half a century ago, Brazilian composer and musician Antonio Carlos "Tom" Jobim (1927-1994) introduced bossa nova to a worldwide audience with "The Girl from Ipanema." This relaxed, cool, sensuous music blended jazz and samba. After recording an album of songs by his friend Jobim, Frank Sinatra is reported to have said, "I haven't sung so quietly since I had laryngitis." Naturally, "The Girl from Ipanema" and Frank Sinatra are featured in this musical collage of countless seamlessly edited excerpts of concert footage that cover decades of events all over the world: from Rio de Janeiro to Lisbon, Paris, Copenhagen, Jerusalem, Tokyo, Montreal, New York and back to Rio.
Seventy critics and filmmakers discuss cinema around the conflict between the artist and the observer, the creator and the critic. Between 1998 and 2007, Kléber Mendonça Filho recorded testimonies about this relationship in Brazil, the United States and Europe, based on his experience as a critic.
16 members from the Brazilian Academy of Letters share their views on the current situation of the portuguese language.
A star medical examiner is called to Brasília, the administrative capital of Brazil, to confirm the identity of a beautiful, young congressional aide's dead body. But his scientific rigor soon leads him to details of a multi-layered political scandal.
Documentary in two parts about Brazilian writer, journalist and sociologist Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. The first part describes how the author used to pass his days with family and friends, while the second offers a historical panorama of the times, including his reaction to Nazism and the years of Vargas’ dictatorship, and the arrival of the modernist movement in Brazil.
Documentary about Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha, one of the most important names in the Cinema Novo, with interviews with some of his friends and colleagues.
Memories of a parrot who participated in the filming of the classic Vidas Secas, in 1962, where it was featured along the puppy Baleia.
On 17 May 1931, the young director Mário Peixoto released his masterpiece "Limite" in a premiere in Capitólio Theater in Rio de Janeiro to astonished audiences bewildered by the impressive and poetic images. Considered by many viewers the best Brazilian movie ever made, this feature has never been released commercially. However, in a great paradox, Mário Peixoto has never made any other movie. The director Sérgio Machado pays a great tribute to the life and work Mário Peixoto a.k.a. Maçarico by his close friends with this documentary, using his diary; footages of "Limite", the never concluded "Onde a Terra Acaba" (1933) and the short "O Homem do Morcego" (1980); and interesting testimonies of Olga Breno, Ruy Solberg, Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Walter Salles among others.
Short musical film paying a tribute to samba composer Zé Ketti, one of the greatest popular artists of Brazilian music. In a jam session, in the late composer's house in Inhaúma, a neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, a group of friends get together to play his music while a "feijoada" (typical Brazilian food with black beans)is being cooked in the kitchen. The samba-players, first-rate samba stars themselves, remember Ketti's great hits in a homage to the man who was best known as "a voz do morro" ("the hill's voice" - but hill as a metaphor for a place where poor people build their shacks in slums, in opposition to city, where middle-class people live in Rio). Among the guests, names of the traditional "samba-school" Portela and ex-partners. Also, the presence of a black hat on an empty chair, represents the composer himself, who died in 1999, after a life of many accomplishments in music, and appearance in three of Dos Santos's films: "Rio, 40 Graus", "Rio Zona Norte" and "Boca de Ouro".
An aging Brazilian actor teams up with a film student on a trip to Mexico, in order to find out an unknown movie his mother allegedly watched before she committed suicide.
After an extended period directing original screenplays, dos Santos returned to the creative engagement with literature that was the wellspring of his early masterpieces, offering a combinatory adaptation of five stories by the renowned Brazilian novelist João Guimarães Rosa. Openly embracing a mode of magical realism, dos Santos' celebrated film tells the story of a farming family defined by the absence of its father who abruptly abandoned his wife and children, sailing away down the river, including his son who continues to communicate with his father, speaking daily to him from the river bank. While offering an evocative vision of rural Brazil as a timeless land of mystery and solemnity, The Third Bank of the River is also bitingly satiric in the remarkable depiction of religious belief when the family moves to the city and its youngest member, a mesmerizing little girl, is revealed to be a kind of saint, capable of miraculous acts. -Harvard Film Archive
Milionário and José Rico are robbed of their money and their fans' enthusiasm. But a female truck driver is out to help them.
Adaptation of Graciliano Ramos's novel about his arrest and imprisonment.
It's Christmas Eve and an aunt and her nephew have to deal with their platonic relationship.
Mid-1970s. When the military regime's "economic miracle" and the victory of the Brazilian football team on the World Cup serve as a distraction for the persecution of opposition leaders by the political police of the dictatorship. Under this context, Jofre Godoi da Fonseca, an alienated middle-class man, is mistaken for Sarmento, a political activist he met at an airport prior to his assassination. He is then arrested for being "subversive".
The rise of real life country singers Milionário e José Rico from their humble beginnings until musical success.
Solange is a recently married young woman whose wedding night did not end well. After constant fights with her husband, she decides to live through her sexual frustration by sleeping with strangers she picks up on crowded buses in Rio de Janeiro.
When a prominent U.S. Nobel Laureate arrives in Salvador, Bahia, the city with the largest black population in Brazil, he stirs emotions by championing a long-forgotten local writer named Pedro Archanjo, who believed that humanity would be improved only through miscegenation.
A newlywed woman, frustrated after her honeymoon, decides to search for lovers on the streets and ends up causing a conflict between her husband, a baker and a black artist.
This story is narrated by an ubiquitous folk singer and tells of a young boy whose mother arranges for him to have an amulet bearing Ogum's blessings which would make him immune to gunfire. The amulet apparently works, for the boy becomes a member of a mobster's hit-team and then joins with a group of people who resist his original employers.
The critical success in France of How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman made possible dos Santos’ delirious science-fiction vision of free love in a post-apocalyptic wilderness besieged by flesh hungry zombies contaminated by an unnamed nuclear attack. Who is Beta? follows two statuesque survivors drawn irresistibly together only to be entranced by the arrival and sudden disappearance of a third, the bewitching raven haired Beta. With its cartoon-like depiction of extreme violence and desire, Who is Beta? offers a heady Pop-infused companion to Hunger for Love. Yet beneath its giddy play of surfaces, dos Santos' underappreciated film gradually reveals a darkly ambiguous metaphoric dimension. -Harvard Film Archive
Brazil, 1594. The Tupinambás natives are friends of the French and their enemies are the Tupiniquins, friends of the Portuguese. A Frenchman is captured by the Tupinambás, and in spite of his trial to convince them that he is French, they believe he is Portuguese. The Frenchman becomes their slave, and maritally lives with Seboipepe.
In another literary adaptation – this time Machado de Assis’ novella O Alienista – and his first color film, dos Santos unleashes an extravagant, maddening excoriation of Brazil’s military dictatorship of the 1970s. As usual, the director exploits all cinematic constituents in his palette – a radically intrusive and discordant soundtrack, non sequitur editing, exaggerated camera angles and all manner of carnivalesque pageantry – to illustrate the tale of a doctor/priest on a mission to discover truth through the study of madness. The population of his asylum grows as his definition of sanity fluctuates until it finally threatens to incorporate the entire town. The film’s own irrational reversals and allegorical codes gleefully mock the arbitrariness of authoritarianism in all its varied guises. -Harvard Film Archive
Edson is having an affair with a left-wing aspiring movie director during Brazil's military dictatorship years. He tries to get some easy money for her film, but ends up being arrested and tortured as his torturers suspect he's involved in a plot to overthrow the militar government.
An extended research tour of US university film programs introduced dos Santos to the American avant-garde filmmakers, among them Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage, who would directly inspire his formally radical adaptation of an allegorical short story about adultery and colonialism by Guilherme de Figueiredo. Filmed in both Manhattan and Brazil and set against the background of the Vietnam War and its protests, Hunger for Love uses a rigorously abstract soundtrack and narrative structure to evoke the acute paranoia of the period building up to the December 1968 military coup that tipped Brazil perilously close to a conservative dictatorship. With its harsh critique of the decadent tendencies of the Sixties counterculture, Hunger for Love offers a key expression of the self-consciously “ideological” phase of Cinema Novo. -Harvard Film Archive
German documentary for TV about the "Cinema Novo" movement (Brazilian New Wave). Director Joaquim Pedro de Andrade focuses on six Cinema Novo filmmakers working in Rio in 1967.
A shockingly irreverent follow-up to the rural austerity of Barren Lives, dos Santos’ Godardian social satire owes more than a nod to the self-conscious antics of the French New Wave. The pampered son of a general, El Justicero is a hipster playboy who fancies himself a James Bond/Jean Paul Sartre urban hero. “Archetypical” yet “full of contradictions,” he sees that justice is achieved for the disadvantaged while taking advantage of certain bourgeois perks. His exploits are closely followed and eventually directed by his biographer who decides a film is not only more lucrative than a book, but it gives him the luxury of reviewing previous scenes. Unlike Bond, El Jus eventually experiences an awakening which threatens to compromise the entertainment value and glamour of his life story. - Harvard Film Archive
An amalgamation of accents and life experiences from different parts of Brazil reunited on the city of Brasília.
Augusto Matraga is a violent agressive farmer who, after being betrayed by his wife and trapped by several enemies, is bitten up and left for dead, being rescued by a couple of humble small farmers who nurse him for a long time until he is well again. Influenced by the couple, Matraga starts a long penitent life while waiting for his hour and chance to payback, starting a fight between his violent nature, his hidden desire of vengeance and the mysticism and goodness which is also part of him.
Statistics, interviews and historical information on illiteracy and inequality in land distribution in Brazil's countryside.
Documentary about the history of Jornal do Brasil, founded on April 14, 1891. In 1965, the Jornal do Brasil marked its innovative and active position, as recorded in the documentary "A Seventv-Four- Year-Old Fellow" by the filmmaker Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and the story itself was in charge of confirming. In the following years, the newspaper would witness the most remarkable events of the second half of the twentieth century in Brazil and in the world. It would applaud the democratic struggles and independence of peoples, support social demonstrations against oppression and justice at all levels. Tirelessly, he did not hesitate to report the truth of the facts, regardless of the circumstances in which they presented themselves.
For his first in a long series of wildly imaginative literary adaptations, dos Santos reinvented Nelson Rodrigues' novel about a pathological gangster with solid gold teeth and a voracious appetite for women and power. Embracing radically modernist narrative techniques, Golden Mouth offers a splintered, refractive portrait of brutal masculinity that returns repeatedly to the same moment from different vantages, each time revealing unexpected perspectives on the brutal yet strangely charming criminal. Lurid and disturbing, Golden Mouth delivers a savage satire of marriage and class pretensions, revealing a similar venality at the corroded heart of the sanctimonious bourgeoisie, the moneyed elite and the working class as they all mercilessly claw their way up and down the rickety and ruthlessly hierarchical Brazilian social ladder. -Harvard Film Archive
In vivid images, the documentary-like story of a drover and his family in the northern badlands of Brazil during the drought. A family in the search of new hope and destiny.
Five segments about the hardships faced by people living in slums on hills in Rio de Janeiro.
In Bahia, an educated black man returns to his home fishing village to try and free people from mysticism, in particular the Candomblé religion, which he considers a factor of political and social oppression, with tragic outcome.
Men work in a quarry on the edge of a hill where a slum is located, of which they are residents. The slope is blown up, advancing to the land near the shacks. Slum dwellers are warned that new explosions can cause damage. The community decides to place itself on the slope, preventing another explosion; without attitude, the foreman gives up on blowing up the hill.
Despite being promised to another man, a young orphaned woman falls in love with man working at the farm she lives in , and together they escape. According tradition in Northeast Brazil, her aunt goes after them, in order to kill them for revenge.
On the day of his wedding, young man from a family of immigrants faces some problems to get the money needed for the last arrangements. The family do what they can in order to honour the great event, selling personal belongings and buying enough supplies for a decent party.
A talented songwriter of sambas is forced to face the social injustices of the city around him.
Banned by Brazil’s Federal Department of Public Safety, Rio, 40 Graus is a landmark film that ushered in the wave of Cinema Novo in Brazil. The film chronicles a day in the life of five peanut vendors from Rio de Janeiro's favelas. This was one of the first Brazilian films to address the issues of race, poverty, and class.
