From Cinema Novo to New Film. 10th Annual Brazilian Film Festival
Written by Vanessa Garcia   
By Vanessa Garcia

“Fifteen miles from paradise...one man will do anything to tell the world everything.” So went one among the many taglines from the 2002 Brazilian film “City of God,” directed by Fernando Meirelles. The film received four academy award nominations in 2004 and put Brazil on the motion picture map - a long overdue pinpoint on the global atlas of cinema.

City of God tells the story of two boys growing up in a Favela - Brazilian slum - one becomes a drug dealer; the other a photographer. In a city where, if you “fight you’ll never survive and if you run you’ll never escape”, the only option is to do as Rocket, the boy protagonist-turned-photographer does: record. After all, as Godard - French Cinema’s master of the “The French New Wave” said years ago, “photography is truth. And cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.”

Adriana de Lucena Dutra, founder of the Brazilian Film Festival of Miami, understands film’s ability to disclose truth. The festival, due to hit Miami for the tenth consecutive year, from June 2nd -10th, has been growing exponentially with the development of the Brazilian film industry and along with the influential depths of globalization. “All film has the potential to represent,” says Dutra, “we really sell through cinema, that’s why the U.S. is so strong.” When the Berlin wall fell, kids were wearing Jeans and listening to rock n’ roll because America has always held Hollywood as one of its main propaganda machines, knowing that sometimes, James Dean may have more power than Congress.



Brazil has something to say, and, in recent years, has embraced the omni-power of cinema in a new way - not as empirically as the U.S., but representatively no less. “These are our stories,” says Dutra, “we take very good care to represent all our Brazil, not just Rio and Sao Paolo, but the whole.”

The event was created as the first festival exclusively dedicated to Brazilian film in the world. “The festival, when it started in 1997, was twelve screens and around fifty people at each screening. Since then, we now have two hundred screenings and a thousand viewers per screening.” That’s a fairly large audience looking at, listening to, and reading Brazil’s “stories.” All the films at the festival are subtitled in English and the festival has now branches in New York (for three years running); is about to start-up in China this summer; and has been going strong in Barcelona for the past several years.

But as to it’s beginnings:
Why Brazil? and Why Miami?

Both questions are easy to answer. Why Brazil? Brazil is the largest and most populous country in South America; the fifth largest in the world. Taking up a plot of carnival, lush soil, poltical turmoil and rich history, it lies between central South America and the Atlantic Ocean. Vast in borders, it touches every South American nation apart from Ecuador and Chile. Its land is a mesh of religions, rainforest, agriculture, and social stratifications - a nation dense in population and territory, engulfed in the webs that historical footprints leave behind. It makes sense that the time has come for Brazil’s stories to spill over through the far-reaching sweep of film.

Why Miami? “Miami is considered the front door to any Latin product in the United States,” says Dutra, “Miami is the third movie spot in the U.S. where there are certainly hundreds of productions being shot... plus, there is a real nationality mix here: Cubans, Italians, Spanish, English...and so on. This shows a real cosmopolitan potential of the city, where the vibration of cultural diversity enables the receptiveness for all the cultures to be lived and appreciated...” In other words: we’re open to the sweep and understand those historical footprints Brazil knows so well.

The Tribute

This year the festival honors Nelson Pereira dos Santos and his body of work with special 8:00 pm screenings from June 5th through 9th at the Miami Beach Cinemateque.

Santos is considered the father of “Cinema Novo,” a movement that brought Italian Neorealism to Brazil. Playing off of “The French New Wave,” Cinema Novo became “The Brazilian New Wave” of the 60s. Its influences still carry through into the cinema of Brazil today. For one, it dealt with social issues and often used real life people playing parts instead of actors playing roles. “City of God” took from Cinema Novo in many respects - many of its actors were not actors at all.

One look at the Brazilian film festival’s website (www.brazilianfilmfestival.com) and the words that literally flash across the screen are the following: “compassion; ethics; persistence; quality; social responsibility; transparency; results.” In these words, it is evident that the cinematic ideals of the founding fathers of Cinema Novo have not died the union of film and social conscious: “the children of Marx and Coca Cola.”