Arquivo

Editorial | Mostra

Who has a friend has everything

If the pit devours it, he searches the bottom

It`s so nice that together all stress is small

It`s a point to shore up when it was absurd

Emicida

São Paulo-born muralist Eduardo Kobra created the following image for the 46th Mostra: a girl reaching for the emblematic moon of George Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902). Kobra, in turn, is portrayed in Lina Chamie’s documentary Kobra Self-Portrait, featured in this year’s selection. The dream image is comforting in the face of these troubled times the world is going through, which are reflected in the more than 230 films in the festival’s programme.

In a decisive year for the country, Mostra presents a wide selection of Brazilian films by celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. Mostra Brasil is structured under two main themes: A Look about the Amazon and A Look about Faith. Brazilian cinema is also present at the 46th Mostra Humanity Award, awarded to director Ana Carolina, creator of exuberant images which have burst through the country’s screens. Her trilogy: Sea of Roses (1977), Heart and Guts (1982) and Dream Waltz (1987) will be screened along with her most recent effort, Endless Passions (2022).

Brazilian history is revisited in screenings of restored copies of Black God, White Devil (1964), The Devil Queen (1974) and Needle in a Haystack (1953). The latter will have a special screening joined by actress and singer Dóris Monteiro, recipient of this year’s Leon Cakoff Prize. Additionally, to highlight the importance of world cinema history, we present the long-awaited restored copies of two films by Jean Eustache: The Mother and the Whore (1973) and My Little Loves (1974), along with a restored copy of Tajik classic Brother (1991), by director Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov.

But the major part of Mostra’s line-up is dedicated to what’s newest and most significant in international audiovisual: works by renowned directors and new authors, with titles from more than 60 countries. The winners of the Cannes, Berlin and San Sebastian film festivals will be presented, as well as films awarded at several other festivals such as Venice, Locarno and Sundance.

Great filmmakers who have participated in past editions of Mostra are sending their new efforts. Among them are Marco Bellocchio, Aleksander Sokurov and Jafar Panahi, winner of the Special Jury Prize at Venice Film Festival, but unfortunately still imprisoned in his country.

This year, Mostra pays tribute to two directors who have left us: Jean-Luc Godard is the protagonist of See You Friday, Robinson (2022), by Mitra Farahani, and Arnaldo Jabor will be honoured with a screening of I Love You (1981), during which the audience will have the opportunity to watch excerpts from his testimony to cycle Filmes da Minha Vida (The Films of My Life).

Besides being reunited with their favourite artists, the audience, as so happens every year, will have the chance to venture into “unknown paths”, and to uncover all surprising gems that await them — after two years, spectators will finally be able to share again this collective experience inside movie theaters. VR (Virtual Reality) sessions, in-person events, return to Mostra after a two-year absence, offering works from Brazil and abroad.

The Audiovisual Ideas Market is also back in town for its second edition, hosting the VI Forum Mostra, the VI Da Palavra à Imagem (VI From Word to Image) along with its pitching session and panel discussion on the topic, and the II Encontro de Negócios (II Business Meeting). These activities, dealing with creative, commercial and political aspects of the audiovisual industry, will take place at the Cinemateca Brasileira from the 26th to the 29th of October. Oh and, of course, long live the Cinemateca! With its reopening, the venue is officially back to Mostra’s circuit!

If we managed to get this far, it was thanks to our sponsors, partners and supporters, who remain by our side as we hold yet another edition of Mostra. For the first time, we also received the support of Amigos da Mostra, an initiative comprised of a group of patrons who are friends to the audiovisual industry and who have allowed Mostra to reach its 46th edition safe and strong.

I am extremely grateful to the Mostra team, to our long-time friends and to the new ones who have joined us along the way.

May everyone have a great Mostra, and may it be a good friend to its audience!

Renata de Almeida

Editorial | Spcine

Cinema is not only capable of transporting us to the most diverse realities, it naturally invites us to dream. The São Paulo International Film Festival, in its 46th edition, becomes once again a catalyst event for dreams.

As ever, Spcine is happy to take part in this collective movement and announces its actions for this year: in-person screenings will be held at Circuito Spcine’s movie theatres, and films from Mostra’s official selection will be available online on Spcine Play’s catalogue.

And more — as part of project Formação Spcine Convida (Spcine Education Invites), a masterclass will be available to the public for free, as well as a commented session of Cineclube Spcine (Spcine Film Club).

Another important action is the Audiovisual Ideas Market. Panels proposed by Spcine, along with training and consulting for projects from Rede Afirmativa Spcine (Spcine Affirmative Network) are planned to take place during Mostra’s 2nd Audiovisual Ideas Market.

With all this, Spcine is proud to be part of the 46th São Paulo International Film Festival and to continue encouraging big dreams to come true!

Spcine Team

Editorial | Sesc

With more than four decades of existence, the São Paulo International Film Festival is an annual event closely linked to the cinephile scene of the largest metropolis in Latin America. If this city houses a good “chunk of the world”, with its abundance of perspectives, it can be said that Mostra’s programme this year reflects this landscape as well as others which serve as inspiration to the various discourses and aesthetics manifested in contemporary seventh art.

This contact with works produced in different contexts reinforces the film- watching experience as one capable of providing political and existential reflections about realities and people. This means of conceiving the world and broadening our horizons also makes us subject to being confronted with that which is similar or different to us. For this reason, cinema has a multidisciplinary way of shaping views.

A partner since its very first edition in 1977, Sesc is Mostra’s ally towards cultural democratization. In the present 46th edition, in addition to CineSesc’s programme, Sesc Digital offers a free selection of films for streaming, strengthening Mostra’s portfolio of platforms that highlight the role of technology in diversifying access. Expanding spectatorship to the countryside of São Paulo, as many as ten Sesc venues will welcome travelling sessions after the festival takes place in the capital.

By keeping up-to-date with cinema’s most recent efforts, conditions are created for the intensification of production and dissemination of ideas that constitute us as multifaceted societies. Through the narratives and images of this universal means of expression, Sesc offers a diversified programme and collaboration with initiatives that stimulate the development of cinematic language, public formation and the advent of poignant cultural scenes.

Danilo Santos de Miranda

Director of Sesc São Paulo

Humanity Award | Ana Carolina

Ana Carolina’s name arrived at the scene with the force of an antithesis, at a time when women’s presence in cinema was minimal and chauvinism reigned in Brazilian society.

The short film Indústria (1969) revealed, from the get-go, her audacity in warping documentary standards of the time by inserting stylized scenes, challenging official representations of progress with images and words that contradicted them. The explicit political discourse announced a daring artist, at a time when social criticism was treated as subversion.

The audacity to show such a personal reading of a public personality makes documentary Getúlio Vargas (1974) a surprising film, which removed the mythic figure from its pedestal, shaking the structures of a hierarchy that isolated and aggrandized people in power.

The pause until Sea of Roses (1977), the director’s first fiction feature, meant more than a period of maturation. The gradual weakening of the military regime during the presidency of Ernesto Geisel (1974-1979) favoured the emergence of films whose rebellious potency no longer needed to be disguised through allegories.

If Sea of Roses is undoubtedly a feminist film, it is so in the broadest sense of the term, a display of insubordination in the face of all forms of oppression, not just male domination. As an expression of this, Ana Carolina implodes notions of order and coherence, prioritizes the absurd and throws her characters into a spiral in which nothing can be controlled. Excessive dialogue also symbolized, at that moment, an explosive response to the long period of censorship and repression imposed by the military dictatorship.

The word “surrealism” has been predominantly used in attempts to analyse Sea of Roses, and inspiration in the movement’s ideas would be reaffirmed in her following feature, Heart and Guts (1982). In it, the feminine universe appears filtered by the oneiric visions of a man, inhabited by ghosts and desires. The theme of power and control isn’t too far from view, but the filmmaker deepens her gaze towards an explicit sexual dimension, contrasting male and female fantasies, opposing castration and jouissance, making the man hostage.

This feminist triptych ends with Dream Waltz (1987), in which rupture or rebellion ceases to be the focus. Tereza, the mature woman played fearlessly by Xuxa Lopes, no longer fights for her freedom. Her main struggle now is: what to do with freedom?

Demanding and harsh, these three films escape the stereotype that used to be associated with a rather imprecise notion of “women’s cinema”, marked by delicate narratives, dramas of abandonment and subtle performances.

After a long break in the 1990s, Ana Carolina’s exuberant irony resurfaced in Amélia (2000), a name that symbolizes femininity in the imagination of the Brazilian alpha male. Without ceasing to be a portrait of a woman, the film is also an acid reinterpretation of class relations and revisits a line of thought that the filmmaker seemed to have abandoned when she moved from documentaries to fiction.

The past, visited in Amélia and all subsequent fiction films, — Gregório de Mattos (2003), A Primeira Missa (2014) and the latest Endless Passions (2022) — is not just a painting, a careful reconstitution. These are films with an ambition to represent different versions of Brazil, but also to interpret the country, to lay bare the imaginary used to establish its identity, to serve as a cauldron of contradictions.

For the ambition displayed throughout her career and for having built a challenging body of work, the 46th Mostra concedes to Ana Carolina the Humanity Award.

Leon Cakoff Prize | Dóris Monteiro

“What about the audition?”, asked the young singer at the end of the meeting. The renowned film critic, and also casting director for his first feature, replied: "No need. You`re so outgoing, so funny, you can skip the audition".

The dialogue, recalled by actress and singer Dóris Monteiro in an interview to website Mulheres do Cinema Brasileiro, reinforces the most prominent characteristic — the naturalness — of her first performance under director Alex Viany in Needle in a Haystack.

The 1953 film wasn`t her debut, though. A year before, Dóris had made an appearance singing in With the Devil in the Flesh, a musical comedy by Spanish director Mário del Rio, along with Ângela Maria and other prominent names in radio. But it was Needle in a Haystack that broadened her repertoire.

By the time she began working seriously as an actress, the name Dóris Monteiro was already blazing on the radio and inside the salons of the most international of hotels on the coast of Rio de Janeiro, the Copacabana Palace. Born in 1934, her debut as a singer was at 16, without prior voice training, using solely the soft singing of her favourite artists — Lúcio Alves, Dick Farney, Nat King Cole — as inspiration.

In an interview with journalist Tárik de Souza, the revealed that ever since she was a little girl, she sang while doing the dishes. A neighbour who could hear her told her mother she should compete on Papel Carbono, one of the most popular radio variety shows at the time. “Oh no! I don`t want my daughter in prostitution!”, was the mother`s reaction. Her father threatened to kill her if she went on the show, but the stubborn girl insisted so much that her family`s resistance was eventually overcome. And she ended up taking top prize.

Ever persistent, Dóris didn`t rest until a singer in her neighbourhood got her an audition at Tupi, one of the main radio stations in the country. She got the green light and, from there, was given air time in several radio stations. The fact that she spoke both English and French made it easier for her to rise to the position of crooner of the Copacabana Palace orchestra, where she was able to perform backed by a licence from the Juvenile Court and under her mother`s watchful eyes.

With a restless, almost petulant personality, her performance in Needle in a Haystack is filled with realism. The lively Elisa offers a precise counterpoint to lukewarm Mariana, the cousin from the countryside, played by Fada Santoro. While Mariana suffers, Elisa acts, makes decisions, interferes in the narrative`s course.

At the time, in a still very conservative Brazil, Elisa emerged as a modern character, who worked, questioned moral taboos and encouraged the family to support her pregnant cousin, an early display of sorority.

Art is driven by life twice in the film: first, with Elisa`s struggle to become a singer, which replicates Dóris` efforts in her own career. And then again when the rookie actress convinces the director to let her read the text her way, bending its rigidity to a more informal phrasing used in everyday life.

Dóris` carefree attitude in front of the cameras can be seen as a natural development of what she had already done in the realm of popular music in the early 1950s. Amidst the loud voices of the samba-canção queens, her small voice stood out with a relaxed, more modern phrasing and sweeping rhythm, early nods to the bossa nova style.

Her acting comeback happened under director Alex Viany in Rua Sem Sol (1954), this time in the non-singing role of a blind young woman for whom her sister, played by Glauce Rocha, sacrifices herself. That same year, she played a waitress in Carnival in Caxias, a musical directed by Paulo Wanderley for film studio Atlântida.

The uninhibited personality would once again emerge as an appealing quality in A Carrocinha, a comedy she co-starred with Mazzaropi in 1955 under director Agostinho Martins Pereira. Her sweet Ermelinda is a simple girl and animal lover, who ends up converting Jacinto into a protector of dogs.

Dóris Monteiro`s singing and acting talents come together in De Vento em Popa (1957). This musical comedy by Carlos Manga sees a romantic relationship develop between her and Cyll Farney, while Oscarito and Sônia Mamede stage comic adventures aboard an ocean liner. The film takes advantage of Dóris` musical popularity and features her singing two of her biggest hits — Dó Ré Mi and Mocinho Bonito. Here, once again, her role subverts standards, changing her repertoire to seduce the boy who abandoned his career as a scientist to become a drummer and nightclub owner.

After a final role in Copacaba Palace (1964), a Brazilian-French-Italian co-production with an international cast led by Italian director Steno, Dóris put her musical career first and was never invited to act again.

Her remarkable presence in Needle in a Haystack and in popular films of the 1950s reveal a little-remembered face of Brazilian cinema. Her affectionate and defiant characters present the image of a woman that is already modern, determined and in charge of her life. She also represents a moment in which Brazilian cinema, despite possible criticism, invented lines of communication with the public and the country. For this reason, the 46th Mostra awards Dóris Monteiro the Leon Cakoff Prize.

Tribute | Jean-Luc Godard

The end of the life of an artist of the magnitude of Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022) does not mean the conclusion of his oeuvre. In addition to an abundant audiovisual production that will continue to circulate, serving as fertilizer for ideas and reinventions, a treasure emerges from the immense archives of the Franco-Swiss filmmaker, now under the control of producer Vincent Maraval.

See You Friday, Robinson is the first unreleased fragment of Godard’s universe that the 46th Mostra brings to Brazil in homage to the filmmaker, who passed away just over a month ago. The film, by Iranian director and producer Mitra Farahani, condenses an online epistolary exchange between Godard and Iranian director and writer Ebrahim Golestan, author of lesser-known but also revolutionary work.

Confined to their respective solitudes, each e-mailed the other every Friday for 29 weeks in 2014. The correspondence explores their unique views on the meaning of art and destinies of the world. Farahani brings them together as two companions sharing the same utopia, explorers of worlds and new languages, creators of realities. Like Robinson Crusoe, they persist like castaways, survivors of a time that has been wrecked.

Instead of recorded interviews with the artists in a moment of twilight, the film is organized around their voices, establishing a dialogue that recovers communication between kindred spirits, though they’d never actually met.

This approach resumes a strategy that had emerged very early on in Godard’s filmography and was consolidated in the late phase of his work.

The role of voice as a spectre came by chance in Charlotte and Her Boyfriend (1958). The short, one of Godard’s four exercises in directing before exploding with Breathless (1960), has Jean-Paul Belmondo playing a prototype of Michel Poiccard, the first feature’s central character.

As Belmondo had other commitments and could not take part in post-production, it is Godard’s unmistakable diction that is heard in the film’s dialogue, like a ventriloquist of sorts, affirming the author’s presence.

Godard’s brief cameos in his first features and in those of colleagues are, curiously, silent. However, his vocal interventions are recurrent in films where a narrator or commentator meddles in fiction, adding a parenthesis, offering reflections or digressions as in Band of Outsiders (1964), A Married Woman (1964), 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967) and Joy of Learning (1969).

After a break of more than a decade dedicated to militant filmmaking and experiments in video, Godard’s voice returns in Every Man for Himself (1980), again as an intruder in fiction, questioning the main character, a filmmaker named Paul Godard. In the following years, the director would adopt a different form of intervention, stepping fully into the scene. Uncle Jeannot in First Name: Carmen (1983), Professor Pluggy in King Lear (1987) and the Idiot in Keep Your Right Up (1987) are examples in which Godard and his characters are indistinguishable. They wear the same clothes and hats as he did in public appearances, chewing the same cigars as he did, muttering disconnected lines and incorporating burlesque references to Jerry Lewis and Jacques Tati, his favourite author- slash-actors.

At the end of this phase, the spectral voice, a mixture of interpreter and oracle, takes on a definitive configuration with the monumental Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998).

In it, the Godardian notion of the audiovisual as a dialogue between sound and image gives way to a new concept, removing images from a particular narrative context (the industry, the authors) and incorporating them in the creation of a collective narrative (the story).

From this point until the very end, in the later Goodbye to Language (2014) and The Image Book (2018), Godard’s voice is superimposed onto images incessantly, to ask once again: what do we see?

Tribute | Arnaldo Jabor

The image of Arnaldo Jabor best known to the public is that of a journalist, consolidated by his eloquent comments on television channel Globo. Long before this phase in broadcasting, however, Jabor had been one of the sharpest artists in Brazilian cinema, capable of exposing, with cruel humour, the collective unconscious of his country, revealing what lies beneath the good manners, ostentation and, above all, repression of a people obsessed with their own image, with what others have to say of them. Few have been able to capture so eloquently the atavistic prejudices of a middle class that continues to wreak havoc.

Born in 1940, Rio de Janeiro, Jabor was part of the second generation of Cinema Novo and produced most of his work in the decades that followed, when the movement had already changed, but its members were still motivated to interpret Brazil.

His first feature film, the documentary A Public Opinion (1967), already contained a close look at the middle class and its values. Under the guise of a sociological record, the film does not hide an ambition to understand the psychology of the collective, a hallmark of Jabor’s films.

Pindorama (1970) is an expression of the most cryptic and allegorical moment of Cinema Novo, a reaction to the toughest period experienced by society and culture after the imposition of AI-5 in 1968.

The year 1973 marks the beginning of the most splendorous phase in Jabor’s oeuvre, with All Nudity Shall Be Punished. A dialogue with the work of Nelson Rodrigues, which continues in The Marriage (1976), provides Jabor with moral, social and psychoanalytic material to deepen his analysis of the desires and fears of the middle class.

In the same vein, his collaboration with screenwriter Leopoldo Serran resulted in Everything’s Alright (1978), a film that is at once chronicle, portrait, analysis and thesis on the Brazilian family institution. Less concerned with the vices and repressions of Rodrigues’ universe, Jabor produces an ambitious and successful study of social psychology. Almost half a century later, the film remains implacable in capturing the hysterical repulsion of the middle class to that which is different, its impulse to dominate and degrade employees, people of colour and from the Northeast of Brazil. It is difficult to say if this is due to the intensity of Jabor’s gaze or if the middle class has plainly not changed, but the fact is that Everything’s Alright remains extremely current.

Jabor’s ability to pierce through social exteriority to register the interiority of desires culminates with a diptych: I Love You (1980) and Love Me Forever or Never (1985), dramas focused on representing what was referred to at the time as the “new romantic disorder”. Even more vibrant than this theme is the sharpness with which both films capture the rise of individualism and its consequences for affection.

At that moment, Jabor seemed to lose interest in the social to focus on the intimate, under a psychoanalytic influence recurrent among those of his generation. What went unnoticed by his critics at the time was the transformations in the political sphere, with the rise of neoliberalism and burst of narcissism that followed, a global phenomenon instantly detected by the sensibility of Jabor’s cinema.

Turmoil brought on by the Collor government, along with the hurried dissolution of Embrafilme, caused Jabor to be transferred to the battlefield of journalism. In it, the chronicler and filmmaker adapted his vision and achieved memorable moments, before losing his balance in parody.

In the late Extreme Happiness (2010), Jabor said goodbye to cinema with emblematic nostalgia, mixing personal memory with that of his movies, in search of the past as a lost paradise.