Over the past two decades, high-profile Brazilian film successes such as Central Station (1998) and City of God (2002) have done the unthinkable. They burst out of art-house cinemas and into the mainstream. These movies screamed Brazil’s burgeoning credentials as a home for filmmaking.
But what their arrival in the limelight also did was set the tone for what the world expects from Brazil: slums, samba, poverty and violence. They created the stereotype of the favela (a term used in Brazil to describe shantytowns) movie, but the international demand for such exotic flavours has meant that domestic filmmakers with other stories to tell struggle for investment and distribution, even inside Brazil.
This month, the return of the Brazil Film Fest aims to right that wrong, with a selection of flicks showcasing the best of a generation of Brazilian directors who take their lenses out of the ghettoes, off the dancefloor and away from the football pitch. ‘Both Central and City were made by directors that were already quite established in Brazil, which means they had the funds to invest in script development,’ explains Anamaria Boschi, the curator of this year’s festival. ‘Brazil has been producing a fantastic body of work, but many of those films will never get distribution. Unless filmmakers receive funding to invest in the whole [campaign and distribution] process, we won’t get to see them.’
The subject of ‘urban development’ dominates the festival selection. Arthur Fontes and Dorrit Harazim’s 2011 documentary Welcome Back, for example, revolves around a family living on Sao Paulo’s east side, a former industrial region that has been home to generations of immigrants stemming back over a century, but now has the greatest density of population in the city. The family first featured in a 2000 documentary made by the same directors; here, the pair return to witness how their subjects’ lives have changed as incomes and lifestyles have improved.
In the feature category, Anna Muylaert’s 2009 award winner Smoke Gets in Your Eyes receives a welcome showing. A black comedy-drama, Smoke sees a guitar teacher living in a high-rise apartment where neighbours only see each other in the lift. But when a musician moves in next door, she falls for him and attempts to quit smoking to win him over. It’s a touching story of love and urban isolation. As director Muylaert tells Time Out, ‘big cities bring loneliness. The idea of privacy – of each person having their own couch, their TV, their own comfort zone – has given people an epidemic that drives us away from each other.’ The film illustrates just that, with a nod to influences including Stanley Kubrick, the Brazilian director’s effort oozing the complexity of the maestro’s work.
Films such as Smoke and Malu on a Bicycle – in which a womanising nightclub owner takes a second look at his life after falling for a carefree girl – offer another side to Brazil’s favela-fixated cinema. ‘One of my concerns,’ explains Boschi, ‘was to work on genres that would portray daily life in different settings, since our Chinese audience knows so little about Brazil.’ The thinking is particularly evident in Ana Luiza Azevedo’s Before the World Ends, a touching coming-of-age story about a boy who receives a letter from the father he has never met. Here, the universality of Azevedo’s protagonist goes beyond its setting, rising above cliché to reveal moving drama.
A major part of the responsibility for Brazil’s current filmmaking dilemma falls squarely upon its own film industry, with producers all too ready to accept the cash and fame from backing films that pander to stereotypes, but less willing to invest that money back into grassroots filmmaking. Where the festival does touch upon Brazil’s favelas, it is with one of the few figures in Brazil’s film industry to buck that very trend.
Producer Carlos Diegues’s 5 x Favela, Now by Ourselves is a collection of five short films following daily life in the favelas and shot by a group of young people from Rio’s slums. Diegues is an important figure in Brazil’s filmmaking history; he was one of the prominent members of the 1960s Cinema Novo movement that tore through political sensitivities to show city life as it was. In his new film, everything from the life of a troubled law-school student who can’t afford the bus fare to a kid risking his skin to fetch a kite from another favela is instilled with optimism and bold human emotions.
Going against the grain isn’t easy, and even the glorious return of Cinema Novo would struggle to change what the world expects from Brazilian cinema today. But the one thing that underpins the majority of Brazil’s independent cinematic output is a gift for storytelling and simple human drama. This is what the Brazil Film Fest perhaps gets across best, through its collection of human stories that challenge our expectations of a complex country. In doing so, it does much to bring light to a part of the world otherwise misrepresented on cinema screens.