Karim Aïnouz's new film, Suely, premiered yesterday in the Horizons section of the Venice Film Festival. I had a very interesting chat with Aïnouz (who is known for his award-winning film Madame Satã) at the end of last year about his film-in-progress, which at the time was called Rifa-Me ("Raffle Me"). Produced by VideoFilmes, Celluloid Dreams (the international distributor), and Shotgun Pictures in Germany, Aïnouz told me that his new work would be "very different from Madame Satã" and that it would be "much more contemporary."

As Aïnouz explained it to me, Suely is about a 21 year-old girl who is abandoned by her boyfriend and starts to do some "crazy things" to get out of her impoverished state of Ceará (where Aïnouz grew up) for southern Brazil. The film is focused "on the body" and "this sort of barren" terrain. Of course, I talked to Aïnouz nearly 10 months ago, so I'm interested to see how the movie has evolved since then. Suely will premiere in Brazil at the end of this month at the Festival do Rio and I'm sure it will play at the Mostra BR de Cinema soon after in São Paulo.

Aïnouz is part of a "young generation" of Brazilian filmmakers who come from an intellectual background: "the fields aren't very defined, there are a lot of critics who become filmmakers - it's more fluid here, for better or worse," Aïnouz explained. He collaborates quite a bit with other rising talents Marcelo Gomes (Cinema, Aspirin, and Vultures) and Sérgio Machado (Lower City) and with the already well-established Walter Salles. "There's so much about filmmaking that is unpleasant, so it's great to have people that you trust. At the end of the day it's more fun for me to have people to talk to." Filmmaking culture in Brazil is also small enough to make collaboration more fluid. "It's the nature of it, we're such a small community. In the context of Brazil and Argentina, as opposed to places where the fields are more consolidated, there's no real defined space. So there is space for collaborating without being competitive." And Aïnouz's network is international as much as it is national - he's part of Dependent Cinema, which he describes as an "informal group of friends who love each other's work" with filmmakers Ira Sachs (Fourty Shades of Blue) and Jonathan Nossiter (Mondovino).

What is interesting to me about Aïnouz's work is that his politics are quite radical: Madame Satã was about a flamboyant transvestite who was black and wanted by the police (which in any society is about as marginal as you can get), and Suely seems like it will be just as charged. Considering Aïnouz was the director of Mix New York and worked on some of the queer classics of the 1990s (Poison and Swoon) before starting his career as a director, it seems he is still very much engaged in the tradition of untraditional cinema.