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Editorial | Mostra

“Festival” is the name of the artwork by Michelangelo Antonioni serving as illustration for the 47th Mostra’s poster. The Italian master’s colors and shapes pave the way for the diverse stories presented in the 362 films from 96 countries.

In addition to the retrospective of his work, Antonioni will be celebrated in a reading of Technically Sweet, a project based on a script by the director, that will one day become an Italian-Brazilian production, and which Mostra’s audience will have the privilege of knowing in its very early stages. Director and producer Enrica Fico Antonioni will be in São Paulo to attend the retrospective and talk to the audience about the project and all of Antonioni’s work.

It is no surprise that the poet of incommunicability and alienation, as many call Antonioni, remains relevant today, in the era of ultra-connectivity.

But unlike the speed provided by internet networks, cinema gives us time to reflect, transforming numbers into people and showing us that the inhabitants of a given place cannot be equated with its terrible leaders or dictators.

“Underground” (1995), an emblematic film on the absurdity of war, will be introduced by Emir Kusturica himself, who returns to São Paulo to join Mostra’s Jury and to be awarded the Leon Cakoff Prize.

The history of cinema continues to be cherished as Mostra presents restored copies of Jacques Rivette’s “Mad Love” (1969), Manoel de Oliveira’s “Abraham’s Valley” (1993), Man Ray’s “Return to Reason” (1923), Rosemberg Cariry’s “Corisco e Dadá” (1996), Pedro Costa’s “Blood” (1989), as well as Hector Babenco’s “Carandiru” (2003). We will also screen restored copies of project Nitrato and films by Lévi-Strauss produced in Brazil, courtesy of the Brazilian Cinematheque.

Lenny Abrahamson, also a member of Mostra’s Jury alongside Kusturica, will introduce three screenings of his work: “Adam & Paul” (2004), “Garage” (2007) and “What Richard Did” (2012). The Jury is then beautifully completed by Bárbara Paz, Enrica Fico Antonioni, Mariëtte Rissenbeek and Welket Bungué.

Júlio Bressane will present his two latest efforts and also be awarded the Leon Cakoff Prize. Two documentary filmmakers are the recipients of this year’s Humanity Award: Errol Morris, who will have his film “The Pigeon Tunnel” in the Mostra’s program, and Sylvain George, who is coming to São Paulo to accept the award and introduce the retrospective of his work.

As expected, Mostra offers much awaited titles from renowned directors such as Aki Kaurismäki, Bertrand Bonello, Wim Wenders, Hong Sang-soo, Víctor Erice, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, and many other masters. Films recently arrived and awarded at the festivals circuit are also part of the program, such as Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall”, winner of the Golden Palm at Cannes, and Nicolas Philibert’s “On the Adamant”, winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. These, and many other discoveries that will surprise our audience with new perspectives.

For the third consecutive year, we’ll hold the Audiovisual Ideas Market, which will include the VII Fórum Mostra, the VII Da Palavra à Imagem (From Word to Image) and the II Mesas de Mercado (Market Panels), making it clear that Mostra is not only an event dedicated to watching movies, but also to reflecting on and discussing the audiovisual and creative industries.

For the first time, Mostra brings part of this year’s selection to the North of Brazil, in a partnership with Centro Cultural Ideias (CCCI), in Manaus. Our customary partnership with Sesc also lives on, with a selection of movies traveling around ten cities in the countryside of the state of São Paulo.

In addition to Mostra’s traditional awards, two new ones will be presented, offered by partners of Brazilian cinema: the Paradiso Award, in support of the theatrical distribution of films, and the Netflix Award, focused on global
acquisition for the platform.

All this thanks to our partners and the Mostra team, who lives and breathes for our drop in the bucket of world cinema. We hope it can bring relief in these difficult times, and enrich our communication.

May everyone have a great Mostra!
Renata de Almeida

Retrospective | Michelangelo Antonioni

Antonioni and incommunicability are words the audience is used to connecting as synonyms. Discovering or rewatching titles by the Italian director during the retrospective of his work offered by the 47th Mostra allows us to understand just how comprehensive the relation between these two terms is.

Still, the mutations in subjectivity and society that Michelangelo Antonioni (1912- 2007) probed over seven decades of activity would not fit into a single formula. “The Adventure” (1960), “The Night” (1961) and “The Eclipse” (1962), which are usually called the “trilogy of incommunicability”, synthesize the main authorial characteristics, that is, the predominant style and themes in Antonioni’s cinema. These films, fully inserted at the peak of modernist cinema during the 1960s, result from a process of maturation of ideas and forms that the director had begun exploring more than a decade prior. This impression of peak form at this stage does not prevent the quantum leap that would be observed with the advent of color in the director’s universe, with “The Red Desert” (1964).

The Michelangelo Antonioni retrospective that Mostra’s audience will have the opportunity to enjoy in 2023 doesn’t solely stimulate the understanding of a coherent oeuvre and the progression of its complexity. It also emphasizes how Antonioni’s work, in addition to its historical relevance, consolidates aspects that define a more authorial contemporary cinema, such as increasingly loose narratives, sensorial expressionism, motiveless and uncertain situations.

The chronology begins with shorts Antonioni directed before his first feature, in 1950. The first two, “People of the Po Valley” (1947) and “N.U.” (1948), much like studies and sketches made by visual artists, are essays in which a recurring characteristic of the director’s cinema is outlined. Human figures almost always appear integrated with the spaces, either fishing, sailing or cleaning the streets, lines of work in which the environment holds as much importance as the movements and actions performed.

What matters here is not so much the recording of praxis, but the way in which the filmmaker connects elements through predominantly plastic and rhythmic compositions.

Antonioni’s first features in the 1950s can be described as melodramas starring bourgeois characters who do not have work as a main concern. The filmmaker isn’t interested in situations of material comfort, but rather in the impossibility of avoiding spiritual discomfort, emptiness or boredom, a theme that brings his work closer to the existentialist literature of Italian authors such as Cesare Pavese and Alberto Moravia.

In “Story of a Love Affair” (1950), “The Lady Without Camelias” (1953) and “The Girlfriends” (1955), the filmmaker explores the possibilities of cinematic language by avoiding psychological naturalism, explanatory dialogues and expository scenes, expanding the duration and deviating from narrative formulas.

The convergence of themes and forms is consolidated from “The Outcry” (1957) on, in which one realizes Aldo’s desolation gets projected onto the landscape where horizons are blurred by mist, followed by the emotional isolation of Claudia and Sandro amid the harshness of the island in “The Adventure”, and Lidia’s alienation in Jeanne Moreau’s wanderings through the architecture of Milan in “The Night”. This expressionist tendency is radicalized with the dehumanization of the world, observed in the enigmatic final sequence of “The Eclipse”, in the use of color to reveal Giuliana’s states of mind in “The Red Desert” and in the chromatic alterations made on video in “The Oberwald Mystery” (1981).

The idea of incommunicability, which some authors prefer to call “erosion of Eros” or “desertification of desire”, is a constant throughout this phase. Here, Antonioni’s cinema moves, like the visual arts, from figurative to abstract.

With “Blow Up” (1966), the director detaches himself from the Italian universe and bourgeois neuroses and plunges into what is both a police and metaphysical investigation, following the adventures of a photographer who unknowingly captures a murder on film.

What is it that the eyes don’t see, but an image can reveal? The question is projected onto cinema itself, with its ability to produce fresh perceptions, to provide other ways of seeing a world in which the human element no longer occupies the center.

In “Zabriskie Point” (1970), Antonioni advances his aesthetics of disappearance, moving from a deserted island in “The Adventure” to a wide desert, this time in California. Both “Zabriskie Point” and “The Passenger” (1975) share the desert as setting and symbol, a space for escape and erasure.

The stroke suffered by Antonioni in 1985 left him with restrictions in movement and speech, but it did not condemn him to incommunicability. His splendid path as a director still led him to “Beyond the Clouds” (1995) and “Michelangelo Eye to Eye” (2004), his swansong, bidding adieu with a dialogue between himself and another Michelangelo, the Renaissance painter, in a film too great for words.

Leon Cakoff Prize | Júlio Bressane

The history of Brazilian cinema, from Humberto Mauro to the harassment endured by all cultural production during the previous government, seems to be more a form of resistance than of existence. Given this stick-in- the-mud condition, the extent and regularity of Júlio Bressane’s oeuvre takes on a heroic dimension.

From his first steps, in the mid-1960s, until today, Bressane’s productivity almost rivals that of the prolific filmmaker and playwright Lulu de Barros (1893-1981). While most of the country’s filmmakers rarely manage to create an extensive body of work, Bressane has maintained an impressive pace for seven decades.

The full list of titles (including existing and lost films) has close to 40 entries, not to mention all obscure Super 8 and video efforts.

The choice to present the filmmaker from Rio with the Leon Cakoff Prize at this edition of Mostra doesn’t stem solely from his productivity, but from Bressane’s long influence on cinema of invention, his restlessness and insubordination in the face of formulaic cinema.

“Killed the Family and Went to the Movies” (1969) is the author’s best known effort. This title can also be understood as a synthesis of Bressane’s aesthetic project. The idea is felt from very early on, in the form of films that deny the established order, praise discrepancies, highlighting that which does not yield to control or logic.

The term “marginal cinema” is still used to label his first features and titles made in partnership with Rogério Sganzerla through production company Belair. “Marginal” here, besides hinting at the notion of poor and unkempt, also means dissident, outcast. The aesthetics created and developed by the director from “Face to Face” (1967) to “Watch Out, Madame” (1970) culminates in two ruptures. First, the dismemberment of the Cinema Novo family and the aesthetic utopia of “engaged cinema”. Then, the infamous themes and situations, which were soon deemed “subversive” by the military dictatorship.

And hence: exile.

Being away from home didn’t hinder, but rather encouraged the dissident vocation of Bressane’s cinema, boosting his condition as a stranger. Upon returning from exile, the filmmaker restarted his project with a sort of reinvention of Brazil. The films of this period, from “The King of Cards” (1973) to “The Giant of America” (1978), pay visit to archaic, popular elements and deviant figures, diverging from the “good taste” proposed by the Embrafilm model and reflected in the search for commercial success.

The chanchada, prehistory, avant-garde and anthropophagy are some alternative forms of expression that Bressane recovered from 1973 onwards, exercising a kind of archeology focused on representations of brazil with a lowercase “b”, a country of the minority.

This phase dedicated to the recreation of myths began in the 1980s and flowed into a series that continues to this day, in which the filmmaker combines highbrow and lowbrow, kitsch and more refined elements.

These films made in maturity often rely on music, literature, poetry, philosophy, psychoanalysis, theater, history and painting as sources. From “Tabu” (1982) to “Capitu and the Chapter” (2021), Bressane remains faithful to his search for an open, hybrid, heterogeneous cinema, resistant to consumption and distraction.

“The Long Voyage of the Yellow Bus” (2023) —which is in the selection of the 47th Mostra—, with its 7-hour runtime, reaffirms how coherent this giant of cinema is. Far from any synthesis or appeasing memorialism, it is a work that opens itself up like an abyss.

Leon Cakoff | Emir Kusturica

“Human beings are prone to forgetting, and the practice of forgetting has become a fundamental art of our species. If oblivion did not erase the trials of our existence, it would be impossible to survive.” The first lines of “Death is an Unverified Rumour”, an autobiography by the Serbian filmmaker, seem to contradict the very notion of a memoir.

If forgetting helps us bear the pain, then storytelling, be it in oral or written form, painting or filming are ways of cultivating utopia, a key nutrient for survival. Memory is responsible for omitting, while imagination powers creation. Emir Kusturica combined these two elements into an inimitable form of cinema.

“Underground”, a restored copy of which will be screened at Mostra, is considered the pinnacle of Kusturica’s filmography. The 1995 film gave the director his second Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Watching it again is like attending a class where the teacher sets animals free from their cages, while the students proceed to get drunk. The 167-minute runtime holds so much excess and ambition, tragedies and laughter, tension and catharsis, that, in the end, it seems as if we have watched the entire history of cinema in one film.

“Underground” is like plugging into a 220V outlet: Kusturica reconnecting to Balkan energy after setbacks faced while shooting “Arizona Dream” (1993) in the United States.

The American dream, a source of great temptation for less commercial directors, seemed an inevitable direction for Kusturica in the early 1990s given that, in the previous decade, the filmmaker had accumulated triumphs.

The generation of artists who had created and maintained auteur cinema after World War II was, little by little, fading away. The historic moment demanded new discoveries. Because of this, European festivals left their roles as consecrators to act as thermometers and hold a space for revelation.

The Golden Lion for Best First Work awarded to “Do You Remember Dolly Bell?” at the 1981 Venice Festival was one of the first signs of this transition. With his next feature, “When Father Was Away on Business” (1985), Kusturica ascended to the Cannes Olympus by winning his first Palme d’Or. During that decade, the spotlight began to shine over names never before heard of, while at Mostra’s queues, moviegoers were learning to pronounce Jarmusch, Von Trier, Soderbergh, Carax.

Mostra, with its formative and informative nature, together with Leon Cakoff’s attentive radar, picked up on these signals immediately. In its 1982 edition, Kusturica’s debut feature was screened and presented with the Critics Award. From then on, Mostra became a meeting point for Brazilian cinephiles and the work of the Serbian filmmaker.

In 2001, Kusturica signed the art for the event’s poster: the drawing of an unusual broken egg, from which images emerged on a film strip. The director’s bond to Mostra was then renewed with the screening of his better known features and more obscure shorts.

To celebrate this common history, to forget all that is forgotten and to reinvent utopias, the 47th Mostra awards Emir Kusturica the Leon Cakoff Prize.

Humanity Award| Sylvain George

French director Sylvain George is not widely known, even among audiences that are attuned to contemporary documentary production. A poet and a photographer, as well as a filmmaker, for nearly two decades George has been building a filmography that projects images of marginalized groups.

Before making his first short films, in 2005, George completed his graduate studies in Philosophy, Law, and Political Sciences, and his knowledge of these fields is clearly noticeable in his cinematic vision.

His filmography is populated by immigrants, homeless, undocumented, excluded, and clandestine people, groups that have been hidden, erased, or confined to “regimes of (in)visibility” in the midst of the “empire of the visible”, terms adopted by George in his theoretical texts.

The filmmaker explains this paradox by resorting to the way journalism usually shows the vessels full of immigrants that illegally reach the most accessible coasts of Italy and Spain. “These images reinforce the idea that Europe is being invaded by barbarians. We don’t see, or rarely see, images of vessels that sunk, were intercepted, or destroyed. We don’t see, or rarely see, images of detention centers, of formal or informal incarcerations, of places and non-places”, he argues, in a manifesto entitled “Time Bomb - Programme Sur le Cinéma qui Vient”.

One of his strategies is to insert himself into the groups he wants to portray, instead of filming them from the outside and from a distance, as police forces (and journalists) do. This immersive process allows him to understand the group’s dynamics and habits, not to capture them here and now, but to compose poetry engrossed in their mode of expression.

This process is guided by three principles: ethical —how to film without stealing images of those who already have almost nothing?—; aesthetical —how to restore visual dignity to these individuals without falling into the spectacle of poverty?—; political —what images can be counterposed to those produced by institutions in power?

George defines his first feature, “The Impossible - Pieces of Fury” (2009), as an “incendiary cinematic poem”. Inspired by Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Dostoiévski, and Benjamin, the film combines images of migrants in the French city of Calais, protests by students and informal workers in Paris in 2009, and archive footage of demonstrations from the 1960s, showing that fragments of repression can take new forms.

This political aesthetic is also present in his documentary “May They Rest in Revolt (Figures of War)”. Released in 2010, it is the result of three years of filming migrant populations in Calais, as well as other marginalized people targeted by the police.

“Vers Madrid: The Burning Bright” (2012) is a film of urgency, that captured history as it was being made. In it, George shows the mass demonstrations that took over the Spanish capital in 2011, portraying the movement, known as 15-M, as a laboratory for new forms of resistance.

Borrowing its title from Hemingway, “Paris Is a Moveable Feast - A Film in 18 Waves” (2017) is a cinematic poem in 18 fragments. The French capital is shown not only through its monuments, but also through movements that reveal an unstable present.

The filmmaker›s most recent projects are “Obscure Night - Wild Leaves (The Burning Ones, the Obstinate)”, released in 2022, and “Obscure Night - Goodbye Here, Anywhere”, released in 2023. After filming the epic journey of this century’s clandestine anti-heroes in Calais, in the North, George takes his camera South to Melilla, a Spanish enclave in Morocco serving as one end of a bridge between Africa and Europe, where nothing but uncertainty awaits.

The 47th Mostra awards the Humanity Award to Sylvain George, for his search for a cinematic language that assures visibility and dignity to the underprivileged and for his work to fight injustice.

Humanity Award | Errol Morris

The setbacks faced by a pet cemetery owner. The stories of the inhabitants of a small, hidden town in Florida. A creator of methods used in capital punishment. Simply reading the synopses of Errol Morris’ films might give an impression that the American documentarian is obsessed with strange characters.

But all it takes is watching just one of his works to understand that, behind the apparent madness, there is always method.

Losing his father as a two-year-old is an event many researchers turn to when looking for the personal motivation behind the filmmaker’s work. Deaths, murders, executions and bloodshed drive Morris’ curiosity, but this doesn’t make his documentaries fall under the “true crime” label.

The first characteristic that draws attention to his films is the length and detail of the interviews. Characters talk extensively and, at times, excessively —they end up betraying themselves, letting slip what their rhetoric intended to omit. Before making films, Morris worked for some time as a detective.

This experience was probably a key element in developing the skills necessary to elevate him to his current position of admired master of investigative documentaries, with works such as “The Thin Blue Line” (1988) and “Standard Operating Procedure” (2008).

Morris, however, defines his works as a detective more modestly: “it was all about talking to people.” In other words, not just about investigating, but about making people at ease so that they would talk a lot. Or too much, preferably.

Viewers can attest the mastery of such a skill in his very first feature, “Gates of Heaven” (1978). While following two initiatives to run pet cemeteries, Morris conducts the interviews and our attention to feelings. As the characters evoke their respective relationships to the deceased animals, the film rawly records essential emotions, such as the need for affection, trust, loneliness or fear.

In his next film, “Vernon, Florida” (1981), the filmmaker once again encourages his interviewees to tell stories. “My rule of thumb is to let people be, to let them talk, and within two minutes they’ll show us how crazy they really are,” reveals Morris.

The biggest turnaround of his career came in 1988 with “The Thin Blue Line”. The film investigates blind spots in the investigation into the murder of a police officer during a routine traffic operation in Dallas, Texas, in 1976. Morris followed his own suspicions, pulled several threads and ended up discovering that the person that had been accused and sentenced to death for the crime was in fact innocent, causing the conviction to be overturned.

Apart from the extraordinary effect brought on by the film project, it also became a landmark for its unorthodox use of dramatization and staging, cinematic resources such which tend to be associated with fictional narratives.

The interest in real-life characters led Morris to produce different profiles, such as that of cosmologist Stephen Hawking in “A Brief History of Time” (1991) and of holocaust denier Fred A. Leuchter Jr. in “Mr. Death” (1999).

Instead of keeping to the anomalous and rare, Morris advanced to another level with “The Fog of War” (2003). This Oscar-winning documentary goes behind the scenes of the turbulent history of 1960s’ United States through the testimony of a massive power figure: Robert McNamara, former US Secretary of Defense.

Those moving the political chess pieces, ignoring individual rights or seeking to impose their obsessions as the truth, are shamelessly exposed by names such as former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in “The Unknown Known” (2013), and manipulator Steve Bannon in “American Dharma” (2018).

At the same time, former cancer patients feature in the short “Survivors” (2008), while in the series “First Person” (2000-2001), the filmmaker continues mapping the extraordinary that lies just below the surface of ordinary lives.

In his most recent effort, “The Pigeon Tunnel” (2023), Morris combines espionage and literature by reconstructing the intriguing career of writer John le Carré and investigating the singular and delicate frontier between reality and fiction in his work.

For his insatiable search for that which delights and terrifies in people, the 47th Mostra awards the Humanity Award to Errol Morris.

Lenny Abrahamson

The veneer of appearances hiding a shattered interior is an image many can relate to, and one Lenny Abrahamson turns to constantly to unsettle his spectators. The name of this Irish director was still rather unheard of when “Room” came out in 2015, followed by Oscar nominations which attracted wide audiences to the movies.

The best actress award secured by Brie Larson’s dazzling performance, together with nominations for best adapted screenplay, best director and best motion picture, boosted the filmmaker’s visibility.

The screening of three of Abrahamson’s early features at the 47th Mostra offers an opportunity to discover a filmography that both forms a tradition and establishes a dialogue with the present.

“A version of Waiting for Godot performed by Laurel and Hardy” —Abrahamson’s description of his first feature, “Adam & Paul” (2004), gives an idea of his dissonant approach to the lives of two heroin addicts, a subject generally doomed to sensationalism.

The duo’s frustrating epopee of everyday life through the streets of Dublin carries the DNA of social realism, a genre intimately connected to Irish cinema. On the other hand, the use of dry humor refers to the influence of Samuel Beckett’s theater of the absurd.

“Adam & Paul” already hinted at a recurring characteristic of Abrahamson’s direction: extracting memorable performances from little-known actors.

In “Garage” (2007), the filmmaker swaps urban depression for rural boredom, without abandoning his sympathy for people in the margins. Although employed and obedient to convention, Josie seems bound to loneliness. But, despite a promise of everlasting melancholy, the film prefers to focus on small, seemingly insignificant moments, as if actively choosing the banal over disturbance.

The minimalist tone and images that work to balance the ugly with the beautiful are additional qualities of this “small” film, dedicated to the small things in life.

“Garage” integrated the Directors’ Fortnight section at the Cannes Film Festival, taking home the C.I.C.A.E. Award, presented by the art house cinema circuit, further expanding Abrahamson’s horizons.

Introspection and repression spin the lethal wheel behind “What Richard Did” (2012), a moral tale about a young man who possesses physical beauty, all the comforts provided by a prosperous family, and a future guaranteed by meritocracy. This seemingly perfect existence, however, takes a dramatic turn.

In a way, “What Richard Did” is a precursor to “Room”: a psychological study in an extreme situation.

Abrahamson practices observing his protagonists as if observing an animal in a cage: by being as mindful as he possibly can to all tensions that rise to the surface. But his true desire remains to reach his characters’ obscure interior.