Corpo ("Body"), the feature debut of directors Rossana Foglia and Rubens Rewald, is the best Brazilian fiction I've seen in quite awhile. It's an elegantly crafted meditation on the bloody residue left behind by the military dictatorship of Brazil's past, focusing consciously on the present and those who occupy it, both living and dead.

In Corpo, bones are unearthed in an unmarked grave in present-day São Paulo along with the mysteriously preserved body of a woman who has been dead for almost 30 years. In an attempt to discover the identity of this woman, forensic doctor Artur (Leonardo Medeiros) encounters young actress Fernanda (Rejane Arruda), who has an uncanny resemblance with the cadaver. But when Artur searches through archives of prisoners during the dictatorship, he finds the dead woman shares names with Fernanda's (still alive) famous sociologist mother. Something isn't right.

Though Artur's need for the truth despite apathy or outright resistance from his peers (embodied by his boss Lara, played with relish by Chris Couto) is fairly standard in a story about crimes of the past, Corpo defies genre by resisting answers or the illusion of closure. What happened before is impossible to truly understand; what matters are the distortion and discrepencies we live with now. And yes, at the center of all this is the human body, raw, erotic, political: signs of torture and a blue ring mark the unknown cadaver, simultaneously exposing her ideology and her vanity.

Corpo is vague enough that it invites repeat viewings to really understand what happens. Thankfully there's more than enough meat on its bones to justify a closer look.

Directed by Eduardo Escorel, O Tempo e o Lugar ("The Time and the Place") is a documentary that portrays activist Genivaldo Vieira da Silva. Inspired by three encounters between filmmaker and subject -- in 1996, 2005, and 2007 (with footage from the last two encounters resulting in the final version of the film) -- Genivaldo tells of his life that has been framed by fighting for agrarian reform in the poor, semi-arid region of the Northeast, specifically his home state of Alagoas.

What makes Genivaldo a character worth watching is his involvement in some of the defining social movements in Brazil and his choices to abandon them for a more personal type of politics. Genivaldo was a regional leader of the Landless Workers Movement, which works principally by identifying land that does not fulfill its "social function" and occupying it by force. He also received training from the Shining Path, a Maoist guerrilla organization from Peru, before starting extensive work with the Pastoral da Terra, a leftist branch of the Catholic Church formed during the 1970s as a response to the military dictatorship. He even ran for mayor of his hometown as a candidate of the Workers' Party (PT), a political party that was co-founded by current Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula).

In some ways, Genivaldo and Lula share similar backgrounds, as they both head-strong men from humble backgrounds that started as leaders of leftist movements. Where Genivaldo's life starts to differ from Lula's is his growing disillusionment with political power, which he comes to believe "changes nothing." He is still involved with agrarian reform but on his own terms, preferring no longer to participate in the huge organizations that influenced his past.

Genivaldo has some interesting stories to tell and his opinions are informative of broader social contexts. Yet I can't help but think that even with Genivaldo's history, O Tempo e o Lugar is not very compelling as a film. The people Escorel chose to interview are expected but not exactly inspired; he dutifully shows each of Genivaldo's family members but not all of them have something to say before the camera. Beyond serving as a lesson of Genivaldo's life seen through his own eyes and a glimpse of political life in Alagoas, I'm not sure I took much more from watching O Tempo e o Lugar.

I remember reading somewhere a little over a month ago that Vincent Cassel is in Búzios filming a movie for Heitor Dhalia (Nina, O Cheiro do Ralo)... and then promptly forgetting about it until now. At this point available information is mainly about casting: Camilla Belle (who speaks fluent Portuguese as her mother is Brazilian) joins Cassel as one of the leads, along with Taís Araújo and Débora Bloch. The title is À Deriva, it takes place in the 1980s, and it is a O2/Focus co-production.

Kátia Lessa interviewed Dhalia in April for Revista Trip (translation mine):

How did the project À Deriva come about?
I had just finished filming O Cheiro do Ralo and I wasn't sure what I was going to do. Then I had loose thoughts with no connection. Something about a girl who discovered that her dad had a lover and who saw her dad having sex with this woman. I wanted it to be a story on the beach.

Have you had some sort of similar experience in your life?
It is not an autobiographical film, but it is strongly personal. I lived on the beach for 20 years and my parents separated when I was the same age as the character, 14. It seems like a light story, but it is much deeper than it seems. It speaks of family, which is a great universal theme and this is a delicate subject for everyone. People get emotional on set. Children are involved, so... it hits home.

Dhalia goes on to say that his next film will take place in Haiti (!). Maybe he should get in touch with Jørgen Leth for some tips.

Blog da 02 Filmes has some pictures up from the first week of filming.

Ironically, the big winner of the 13th It's All True International Documentary Film Festival, Pan-Cinema Permanente directed by Carlos Nader, features a subject that declares, "I don't need truths! Just lies. Essential lies." That pretty much sums up poet Waly Salomão's over-the-top attitude in this film that is a loving portrait made by a dear friend. Salomão was an excessive personality who made life a performance.

As someone who had never heard of Salomão before watching this film, there are two scenes that I remember very fondly. One is footage of an interview Salomão gave on Syrian television. (Salomão's father was Syrian and he goes to the fatherland to reconnect with his relatives there.) The calm, polished demeanor of the interviewer plays at perfect odds with Salomão's eccentricity, to revealing and hilarious effect.

The other scene is a confession by the director that Salomão simply never let his guard down for the camera. The only glimpse we have of him relaxed is when he is sleeping, but even that footage is not as straight-forward as it should be. Opaque in every way, Salomão actively creates and projects his own image throughout the film.

What I loved about Pan-Cinema Permanente was that Nader lets Salomão have center stage while not one-upping him. The editing is quick and playful and the visuals, full of color, are approached in surprising ways. Watching Salomão's endless energy can feel a bit exhausting at times, but the impact of his art and life on those around him must have been a wonderful thing.

Earlier this month I caught Estômago, directed by Marcos Jorge. The film took a bunch of awards last year at the Festival do Rio and seems to have been an audience favorite wherever it has played. The story is about a seemingly naive man from the Northeast, Raimundo Nonato (played by João Miguel), who comes to São Paulo looking for work. He shows some natural talent at cooking and gets noticed by a prosperous restaurant owner, who takes him under his wing and teaches him the nuances of the finer foods. Juxtaposed with these scenes are revelations of Raimundo's jail time in the future, where he uses his culinary knowledge to ingratiate himself with his cellmates who are a little rough-around-the-edges. The film relies on the audience's desire to reconcile Raimundo's bleak future with his promising present to create suspense; on the way he falls in love with a food-obsessed prostitute who is more than willing to accept Raimundo's cooking as a form of payment.

João Miguel has made a career out of playing simple Northeasterners to perfection in Cinema, Aspirinas e Urubus, O Céu de Suely ("Love for Sale"), and now Estômago. He really carries this movie and gives it heart. Personally, I would have liked the plot fleshed out to depend less on the vicarious satisfaction of seeing people prepare and eat delicious food. Doesn't everyone love a good cook? Raimundo cooked miracles time after time, and while I watched (getting hungrier by the minute) I couldn't help but think it was a little too easy.

That said, I found Estômago entertaining if not all that original, and I enjoyed Giovanni Venosta's playful score. As this is Marcos Jorge's first feature I am now very curious to see what he will do next.

It's finally official: Blindness, directed by Fernando Meirelles and based on the book by José Saramago, will open Cannes. A lot of us who work with film in São Paulo were pretty shocked when the film didn't make the competition lineup as it seemed like a shoe-in, but the possibility of it scoring the coveted opening night slot hadn't even occurred to me!

With the combined pedigree of the director, cast (including Julianne Moore, Danny Glover, Gael García Bernal, and Mark Ruffalo), and source material, expectations for this one are high. It's O2 Filmes' biggest production yet and media attention since filming in São Paulo last year has been intense.

For those of you who read Portuguese, Fernando Meirelles has been keeping a blog about his experiences with the movie. I found this part interesting, where he explains that Miramax had reservations about the intensity of the cut he screened for them (translation mine):

"By contract, the final cut is mine, but these guys know what they're talking about and I took advantage of their expertise and my disposition to rethink once again the editing. I thought they were hypersensitive to the scenes of sexual violence and I didn't pay too much attention to their comments. Not one friend in Brazil had mentioned this problem. North Americans are more moralistic, I generalized. But nevertheless, as a good neighbor policy, I decided to lessen a little the film's voltage. A little."

By the way, you can see the movie's oddly-paced (in my opinion) trailer below:

Have you heard about Tropa de Elite? It's the most talked-about Brazilian film in years, not just for its explosive subject matter but also for its completely unprecedented journey to the big screen.

Tropa de Elite hits screens today in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, but according to the film's official website, the release date is (while I'm writing this) still listed as October 12 -- and until a few days ago, that was the distribution plan. But things didn't exactly go according to Universal's plan. Roughly a month ago, pirated DVDs of the film appeared on the streets of Rio and became an overnight sensation. By the time Tropa de Elite officially premiered as the opening night film of the Festival do Rio on September 20, an estimated one million copies of the film had already been sold. Due to the nature of piracy the numbers seem rather arbitrary, but a few weeks ago the popular TV program Fantástico said that three million people had seen it. I hear from my friends in Rio that how many times you've seen Tropa has become a matter of pride (you saw it twice? that's nothing!). So, in a desperate effort to actually get people to pay for a ticket to the movie, Universal made the last-minute decision to push Tropa's release date up a week, forcing movie theaters and distributors to hectically rearrange their already busy schedules.

Despite the fact that Tropa de Elite is backed by people like Harvey Weinstein - who doesn't exactly need my money - my conscience won't let me buy or watch a pirated copy of a Brazilian film, so I can't say if the hype is deserved until after this weekend. However, this is a movie I've been interested in for quite some time, namely because it's directed by José Padilha (who made the tragic documentary Bus 174) and starring one of the country's most talented actors, Wagner Moura. (In fact, the production had its fair share of drama, but I won't go into that here.) This time around, the subject matter is just as urgent as Bus 174's, centering on the training of an elite police squad before they enter battle with drug traffickers in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. The police are among the most universally loathed and untrusted people in Brazil, so narrating the film from their point of view has provoked its fair share of controversy. Pirated DVDs have made it possible for those in the slums who have their own experiences with the police to contribute heavily to the discussions surrounding Tropa de Elite.

It's been awhile since a Brazilian film has struck such a nerve. Universal may not be getting any direct profits from the pirated DVDs but they've benefited immeasurably from the endless media attention that has been given to Tropa de Elite. How many films have become blockbusters before they're even released?

Catching up (a little) on blogging... ResFest's 10th edition came and went, marking its first year at the Cinemateca Brasileira's new location in the Vila Mariana neighborhood. While it's hard to reach the place without a car (I never learned how to drive one anyway), getting there is worth the effort -- the venue is incredible, by far the most comfortable theater in the city for the cultural frenzy of a film festival. After hearing an appropriately bossa nova-themed set from ex-Cibo Matto singer Miho Hatori, I caught a session of surprisingly strong Brazilian shorts, the highlight of which (for me) was Paulo Caruso's "Alphaville d.c. 2007". The film focuses on a French-speaking cowboy (his name: "I am the third person plural. I am they.") who avenges the Third World in an infamous gated community outside of São Paulo. Bizarrely philosophical and often hilarious, it's great experimental filmmaking that manages a scathing social commentary without sacrificing entertainment.

Today saw the launch of Programadora Brasil, an ambitious program created by the Ministério da Cultura with the Secretaria do Audiovisual, the Cinemateca Brasileira, and the Centro Técnico Audiovisual which will facilitate the exhibition of recent Brazilian productions and historical films in non-commercial circuits. It's a well-documented fact that there is a severe shortage of movie theaters in Brazil, and the few screens that do exist are dominated by American films. Therefore, one of the objectives of the Programadora Brasil is to democratize access to national cinema as well as increase exposure to Brazilian filmmaking.

Another objective of the Programadora is the restoration of historical films. According to the Ministério da Cultura's press release, the program was launched with 126 films that span nine decades. These films are organized in "38 thematic programs [that are] directed at various audiences," and will be sent to any organization in the country that wishes to show them in public (non-commercial) sessions, from public schools to cineclubes. The plan is to continually expand the program's catalogue, with a goal of obtaining 1,000 titles.

Another exciting project is that a magazine will be published in conjunction with the DVDs with "the intention of recuperating critical thinking" and elaborating "debate about Brazilian cinema."

With a multi-million real (Brazil's currency) budget, Programadora Brasil has the potential to be far more effective than its well-meaning but under-funded (and non-governmental) predecessors. What's more, being a government project headed by Gilberto Gil (a revered musician who is now the Minister of Culture), it has enough influence to actually make a difference. I'm particularly looking forward to getting my hands on the magazine, as there is no publication that is dedicated solely to criticism of Brazilian filmmaking. Of course, projects like this always seem good on paper, but it's the details that make it a success or failure. (If you read Portuguese, TELA VIVA has a good rundown of the nuts and bolts at the bottom of the page.) I hope they manage to make it work.

Like the popular television series it is based upon, A Grande Família - O Filme, directed by Mauricio Farias, is about a colorful family that embodies a lifestyle, though exaggerated for the sake of comedy, that is typical of the Brazilian middle class. I've only seen small parts of the series, but I've heard nothing but good things: funny, well-acted, and fresh. The film version only confirms what everyone says about the cast -- it's excellent, and the characters come alive in a showcase of considerable ensemble talent.

The actors go to an admirable effort to make the material work, but A Grande Família - O Filme's script suffers from serious problems. Most disappointingly to fans of the series, the movie simply is not funny, and due to a bizarre contrivance the same plot developments literally repeat themselves not once, not twice... but three times. (Honestly, it's really annoying.) The story ostensibly revolves around matrimonial misunderstandings, like the dad Lineu losing his wedding ring and the mom Nenê suspecting her husband of betraying her, but the script is such a mess that it's hard to decide if there is any single concept that's meant to tie everything together.

Late last year Walter Salles complained that Brazilian filmmaking has been taken over by a television aesthetic. I don't necessarily have a problem with tv-film crossovers, but A Grande Família - O Filme illustrates exactly the point Salles was trying to make. In a bid for success at the box office, it's a rehashed product that makes no effort to adapt the episodic nature of the series to a feature-length format. Add the fact that the frames are composed with the standard closeups and stationary shots that beg to be cropped to a television-friendly format, and I come to the depressing conclusion that cashing in was the only reason A Grande Família made it to the big screen.

APCA, the Associação Paulista dos Críticos de Arte, announced on Monday its "best of the year" awards for Brazilian film and television productions. O Céu de Suely, which would also be my pick for best Brazilian film of 2006, took the top honors with best film, best director (Karim Aïnouz), and best actress (breakthrough Hermila Guedes). Awards will be given in March, and the complete list of winners follows below:

FILM
Film: "O Céu de Suely"
Director: Karim Aïnouz ("O Céu de Suely")
Cinematography: Murilo Salles ("Árido Movie")
Script: Cao Hamburger, Cláudio Galperin. Anna Muylaert, Bráulio Mantovani ("O Ano em que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias")
Editing: Vania Debs ("Árido Movie")
Actor: Matheus Nachtergaele ("Tapete Vermelho")
Actress: Hermila Guedes ("O Céu de Suely").

TELEVISION
Critics' Grand Prize: "Os Filhos do Carnaval", by Cao Hamburger (HBO/O2)
Documentary: Série Chico Buarque de Hollanda, by Roberto de Oliveira (DirecTV/Band)
Program: "Central da Periferia", by Regina Casé (Globo)
Actress: Lília Cabral, in "Páginas da Vida" (Globo)
Actor: Lázaro Ramos, in "Cobras & Lagartos" (Globo)
Children's Program: "As Novas Aventuras do Menino Maluquinho" (TVE)
Comedy: Dira Paes, of "A Diarista" (Globo).
(The award-winners of HBO and DirecTV were local productions made by national production companies from the resources of article 39 of the Ancine Law.)

Two Brazilian films have been selected for Sundance 2007: O Cheiro do Ralo ("Drained"), directed by Heitor Dhalia, and the documentary Acidente, directed by Cao Guimarães and Pablo Lobato. I've seen O Cheiro do Ralo and it's easy to imagine this film playing at Sundance... basically because it was so obviously influenced by American independent film. (Dhalia has said himself that this was his intention.) But what truly gives this film its "indie" badge is the fact that it was made with practically no sponsors and no investors, with the cast and crew working for nothing. With a smart marketing campaign combining guerrilla tactics and festival prestige, besides the fact that it is based on a graphic novel, O Cheiro do Ralo has the makings of a nicely popular cult film. For me, memorable and often hilarious performances from Selton Mello and Silvia Lourenço are what made the movie worth watching.

Thursday is the first of three November holidays in São Paulo, and I'll be travelling tomorrow night for some much-needed relaxation. The Mostra prize winners will be announced on Thursday night along with a screening of a restored copy of the 1969 classic Macunaíma directed by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, one of Cinema Novo's most celebrated directors who is being honored this year with a retrospective. From the Mostra's tribute:

"Macunaíma innovated on the aesthetics of Cinema Novo, incorporating elements of slapstick comedy and transfiguring facts from political life that permeate the epic description of Macunaíma's wanderings among figures from popular mythology. An emblematic film from the late sixties, the film brough a heritage of modernism up to and established a much desired link between Cinema Novo and the public."

High praise. I'm excited about finally having a chance to see this classic that everyone here seems to love -- fortunately, the restored copy will be released here theatrically.

My short mid-fest report on the Mostra is up on indieWIRE: "At 30 Years, the São Paulo International Film Festival Celebrates Its Legacy." Be sure to check back here to see who took the top prizes on Thursday night.

A committee formed by the Ministério da Cultura just announced that they chose Cinema, Aspirinas e Urubus (Cinema, Aspirin, and Vultures) as Brazil's submission for Best Foreign Film in the 2007 Academy Awards. (I quickly wrote about the prizes Marcelo Gomes' film won at the 29th Mostra BR de Cinema last year.) The committee was comprised of Orlando Senna, Andrucha Waddington, Carolina Kotscho, Ilda Santiago, Jorge Bodansky, Moisés Augusto, Ricardo Mirando, and Sandra Werneck.

Brazil's submission last year was the blockbuster 2 Filhos de Francisco (my article for indieWIRE), and if the Ministério da Cultura had chosen the most financially successful of the 14 candidates again this year, the submission would have been Zuzu Angel.

Personally I think the Ministério got it right with Cinema, Aspirina e Urubus. It's a lovely film with striking artistic vision. Whether or not it will be nominated is anyone's guess, but at least it is a strong and deserving candidate.

We're in the final stretch before election day on October 1, and Cine Bombril in São Paulo is hosting a program called Cinema e Política to help facilitate some of the political discussion. João Moreira Salles' documentary of Lula's 2002 election campaign, Entreatos (which I've mentioned here before), will be shown following a Q&A session with Moreira Salles afterwards. I'm curious to see what Moreira Salles has to say about politics in Brazil 4 years later, especially as many of Lula's primary advisers shown in the film have since been hit with scandal.

Oh and regarding the current situation - a victory for Lula in the first round is all but guaranteed, but Alckmin (his main rival) has raised a few points in the influential south. Most Brazilians are pretty bored with the election.

Fernando Meirelles is Brazil's current darling director, the local film industry's most recent role model for strong vision and artistic success. After his decade-defining film City of God, Meirelles' English language follow-up The Constant Gardener was received in Brazil with a breathless enthusiasm that was slightly overboard. Anyway, there's no denying the guy has talent, and the announcement that Meirelles will direct a film adaptation of Blindness by José Saramago was big news today in Brazil -- the entire front page of the Arts section of the country's most important newspaper (Folha de São Paulo) was dedicated to the issue.

Meirelles had originally wanted to adapt Blindness in 1997 for his first feature-length film but Saramago declined, saying that there wasn't much point in transforming a story about blindness into images. Now the film will be made in the English language as a Canadian-Brazilian-Japanese-English independent coproduction and will be shot in Toronto and São Paulo with a budget of US$20 million.

I've quickly translated the short interview with Meirelles that ran in the Folha today...

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.

An interesting point made at the "Brazilian Blockbusters" panel today at the FIICAV was that many of the most successful Brazilian movies in the national market have been biographies, eg, Cazuza - O Tempo Não Pára, 2 Filhos de Francisco, Zuzu Angel, Olga, and Vinícius. Director Breno Silveira (2 Filhos de Francisco) suggested that the Brazilian public is in serious need of its own heroes, and producer Rita Buzzar (Olga) said that audiences strongly identify with characters that are based on facts and the Brazilian reality. This echoes the idea that what filmmakers from an emerging market with limited resources can do better than anyone else is tell stories about themselves.

I've heard some comments that the trend of history-lite films "based on" the lives of real people indicates a crisis in fiction. On the one hand, Brazilian biographical movies are important vehicles for reflecting on national identity, but on the other hand, we still need fiction that takes a risk on creating characters that are equally as memorable.

Hello! I'm Michael Gibbons. I came to Brazil in 2005 by way several cities and a few countries, and I don't plan on leaving. I write some "Dispatches from Brazil" for indieWIRE and this blog will pick up where those dispatches leave off. Because after all, São Paulo is one of the largest cities in the world and it would be a crime to ignore all the interesting things that happen here.

What will be the first film to break the blog in? I think it should be Andrucha Waddington's Casa de Aréia, or House of Sand, which I hear is currently showing in some U.S. theaters. I'd recommend that anyone go see this movie: it's as fine a specimen of recent Brazilian cinema as you're likely to find, and you can't go wrong with a cast of Fernanda Montenegro (famous internationally for Central Station), Fernanda Torres (her daughter), and Seu Jorge (singer/songwriter/actor). But the most memorable element of the movie is the landscape, which overpowers the characters to such an extent that it's a wonder that any of them manage to survive.

If it were up to me, House of Sand would have been my choice for Brazil's submission to the Academy Awards last year. (In October I wrote about the box-office hit 2 Filhos de Francisco being submitted instead. Both films were produced by Conspiração Filmes.) Speaking of Oscar submissions, I'm curious to see what Brazil will send for 2007...