manas (w&d. marianna brennand, w. carolina benevides, camila agustini)

Manas tells the story of a Tielle, a 13 year old girl growing up in the Amzonian state of Para. She lives in a house which can only be accessed by river, with her mum, her sister, two brothers and her dad. Her older sister ran away to Rio several years ago. The reason for her flight soon becomes obvious: Tielle’s dad is a child abuser who tells his pregnant wife he wants Tielle to sleep in his bed, having cut the cord of her hammock. Tielle is fast forwarded towards adulthood with dramatically predictable results. Manas is well filmed and acted and the script rolls along effectively. Its exotic location is part of the film’s appeal, which given this is a film about child abuse might seem paradoxical. It’s notable to see the names of the Dardennes brothers in the credits, along with Salles. There are clear echoes of the Dardennes’ themes and aesthetic (roving hand-held camera) but despite Jamilli Correa’s compelling performance, there’s a formulaic element to events which undercuts the urgency of the message. 

lucio flavio (w&d héctor babenco, w. jorge durán, josé louzeiro)

Lucio Flavio, an early film by the lauded Argentine director, is a crime thriller, based on a true story, mostly set in Rio. This Rio of the seventies feels amazingly evocative, the men in flares and open long-sleeved shirts, drinking cold beers whenever they can. You can feel the heat and the sweat oozing through the screen, something complemented by the judicious use of long-shots when we see the street in all its dusty glory, with Lucio, the anti-hero, on his way to his next robbery or about to be busted. The film is based on the way that a police death squad used criminals for its own corrupt ends. Lucio knows he’s a dead man walking, but it doesn’t stop him walking with a strut, embracing his destiny, a strangely heroic figure in a tawdry world. The remarkable thing about Babenco’s film is the way in which it shows a society that has changed so little. A strange quirk of this blog is that for some reason, the 2007 Brazilian film, Elite Squad, is by far the most viewed review, (obviously as a result of some kind of strange algorithm), and Lucio Flavio is a clear predecessor to Padilha’s blockbuster, with both films revealing the baroque arrangements between the police and the underworld, as the police seek to muscle in on the streets which belong to the criminals. Babenco directs with flair, using occasional dream sequences to lend colour to the prosaic events. Whilst in some ways a generic crime flick, Lucio Flavio also infiltrates a sly commentary on the torture and summary executions carried out by the dictatorships of the time, and as such was a way for Babenco to comment on events in his native country in a way that the censors would never have permitted if the commentary hadn’t been smuggled in under the guise of a crime film. It’s a fine example of the way in which the codes of cinema permit a discourse which is more wide reaching that the apparent subject matter, as well as offering a telling insight into a lost Brazilian decade. 

mato seco em chamas (w&d adirley queirós, joana pimenta)

Mato Seco em Chamas, translated in English into Dry Ground Burning, is a curious blend of Ghetto Mad Max, muscular feminist filmmaking and documentary footage. Three women succeed in stealing petrol from an underground pipe, which they sell at a discount to the motoboys in their marginal barrio, situated in the hinterland on the edge of Brasilia. Two of the women, Chatara and Lea, are sisters, with Lea recently released from prison. A third, Andreia, is setting up her own political party, PPP, which could be understood as the Prisoner’s Party for the People. The trio defend their territory as the police move in, before Lea is rearrested. The filmmakers smartly employ some barnstorming biker imagery, as the motoboys procession through the barrio, and at another point when Andreia leads them, as though at the head of a great cavalry movement. These moments, and the shots of the oil well, have a romantic cinematic power, summoning up the ghosts of Brando in The Wild Ones or Dean in Giant. The images feel as though they are being skilfully welded onto the unwieldy mechanism that is the film overall.

Because, Mato Seco em Chamas is clearly far more than just a dystopian drama. It’s also clearly rooted in the everyday turmoil of Brazilian society. There is footage from a Bolsonaro rally, as well as several sequences in the favela where the women are based which have a vivid fly-on-the-wall feel. A female singer performs to a favela crowd; Andreia sings in a Pentecostal church. The line between fiction and fact is blurred, even more when the film suggests that its protagonists aren’t actually actors, but real people who have been drafted into this fiction, and the apparent reveal that Lea has gone to prison a second time actually means that the actress who is playing Lea has gone back to prison.

The resultant film is percussive, punctuated with music from the barrio, treading a fine line between the real and the imagined; showing us a favela world which is lived like a Mad Max movie, and who are we to know how true or not this is. A sequence towards the end seems to suggest that the petrol which the women trade is actually a cipher for narcotics, but even this remains unclear. At two and a half hours long, this is a challenging, radical film which feels as though it has emerged from some kind of parallel cinematic sphere, one which knows and uses the tropes of cinema, but isn’t all that interested in them: instead it seeks to capture something of the reality of the Wild West of Brazil’s edge-lands. 

medusa (w&d anita rocha da silveira)

Medusa has some elements in common with a project we are working on, which also has its roots in Latin America. It may be a massive generalisation, but it feels as though the issues surrounding feminism, which include class and race, not to mention violence and femicide, are lived on a sharper edge in that continent. Medusa spins the trope on its head, opening with a scene where a band of women hunt down their female prey, accusing her of being a slut and beating her up. The vigilante band, to which the film’s protagonists belong, are religious evangelists, who sing sexy songs in the name of Jesus for their church choir. The church is lead by the handsome and charismatic pastor who also has a band of vigilante boys as part of his congregation. As the film unfolds, the protagonists undergo a perhaps predictable transformation, turning against the church and indulging in sexual relationships out of marriage, as well as becoming victims of male abuse. The film has various narrative threads which seem to function more as platforms for its discourse than roads to go down. A missing mythical burns victim, a lesbian romance, orgies in the woods. Nevertheless there is a verve to Da Silveira’s direction which keeps driving the movie forwards. The preacher who embodies the Bolsonaro subtext is righteously skewered, and the narrative around evangelism, so strong in Brazil, helps to illustrate the way in which oppression of women is perpetrated in many different guises. 

cabra marcado para morrer (w&d eduardo coutinho)

Coutinho’s documentary is a testament to a filmmaker who refuses to give up. In 1964 he began making a film about the assassination of João Pedro Teixeira, the leader of a rural cooperative who had been protesting against working conditions. Two years after the activist’s death, Coutinho set about making his film, using local people as far as possible to recreate the events leading up to the murder, including Elizabeth, Teixeira’s wife and her eight children. However, the shoot was shut down by the authorities, accusing the filmmakers of being Cuban revolutionaries, and most of the material was confiscated. Some takes survived and in the early 80s, with the political climate having changed, Coutinho returned to Pernambuco in the North East of the country with a double mission: to rediscover the characters from his film and, in a different sense, to complete the film he started making twenty years earlier. The result is an act of political resistance per excellence. The story of Teixeira is narrated by the rediscovered characters, whilst luminous black and white images from the sixties fill the screen. Coutinho finally tracks down Elisabeth, who has been living for years under a different name. Now the director gets to tell her story as well, how she protested against her husband’s death and also how she lost touch with almost all of her children. Coutinho tracks them down, going to all corners of Brazil to find them, and in this way the film is also a tragic portrait of the effects of the dictatorship on the country, the way in which it ripped families to pieces. Coutinho’s film is at once a portrait of a society emerging into the light after years of repression, and a fierce political diatribe, which stands alongside the work of directors such as Pontecorvo, Costa Gavras and Solanas.  

deserto particular (w&d aly muritiba, w henrique dos santos)

Muritiba’s film is a febrile tale set in Brazil’s North East. The set up is simple. Daniel, a jaundiced cop who is going through a midlife crisis, has fallen for Sara, an on-line crush. Suspended from work and exhausted by having to look after his elderly father, Daniel flips and sets off to find Sara, who has lately gone off-line and abandoned him. Hunting down Sara in a small town proves harder than he expected, until he gets a call from a friend of hers and they finally hook up. Only for Daniel to discover, a la Lola, that she was a he. The film then becomes about Daniel seeking to come to terms with his attraction to a bloke, and Robson/ Sara struggling to keep his/her life together as it looks as though his secret is about to get out. Deserto Particular is a film that is constantly on the point of coming to a climax that it constantly puts off. Gender identity has become one of the dominant themes of twenty first century culture. It’s an issue that crosses geographical boundaries and as such offers a film employing this thematic a universal appeal, however, it is also becoming something of a cliché, and it’s not hard to guess where Deserto Particular is headed long before it gets there.  What makes the film hold up are the performances. Antonio Saboia as Daniel retains a convincing macho aura, even as his infatuation with Sara threatens to overwhelm him. But stealing the show is Pedro Fasanaro as Sara/Robson. Fasanaro gives a beautifully restrained performance, as convincing as Robson hanging out with his workmates as he is as a femme fatale. It’s a beguiling performance which helps to steer the film beyond melodrama. 

the posthumous memoirs of brás cubas (machado de assis, tr neil macarthur)

Who is this Brás Cubas? The question keeps returning as the reader engages with his ‘posthumous memoirs’. Is it the author himself? Is this a Proustian tale? If so, it’s Proust refracted through a kaleidoscopic Brazilian lens. The novel of approximately 250 pages is divided into 160 chapters. Some no longer than half a page. Several make comments on previous chapters, or the telling of the story. The effect is one of a mosaic. Long before the arrival of Derrida, we have a shattered text, the pieces of which the author is assembling into something resembling a story, albeit a chaotic, at times incoherent story. At the same time, there are details, such as the author’s description of his affair with Virigila, the wife of a politician, which feel as psychologically precise as anything in Proust. The writing captures the mechanics of the affair, as it wheels its way through the tortured stages of passion, disinterest, guilt and despair. Brás Cubas feels like a real person, albeit one who approaches the business of storytelling in a fashion that is not normally permitted in novels, full of diversions and asides. Much like real people actually think, rather than the pseudo coherence of the normative idea of character espoused in the western novel. In this sense, we can almost hear the faint sounds of the lumbering approach of Joyce and Woolf, or perhaps the distant rumble of Sterne. Machado de Assis’ novel brims with an energy which sometimes overflows, but which propels the book forwards even when the apparent line of advancement feels utterly baffling. In the end, one could analyse the novel in purely story terms, tracing the life of the narrator as he navigates the waters of Rio’s political and social life. But this would be to ignore the thing that distinguishes the novel, which is its capacity to incorporate a shade of madness into an otherwise matter-of-fact story.  

la vida invisible de eurídice gusmao (w&d. karim aïnouz, w. inés bortagaray, murilo hauser)

Aïnouz’s film is a melodramatic love letter to a lost Rio de Janeiro. The recreation of 1950s Rio, in this tale of sisterly love, is spellbinding. A place of wild, ragged gardens, of steepling views, of steamy clubs and stifling families. But, significantly perhaps, no guns, no gangs. A poverty which transcends race, but also unites above and beyond race. I have too little knowledge of the city to know whether Aïnouz’s vision is idealised or not, but it is always beguiling and fascinating to see a Latin American film aspire to the sweeping grandeur of early Coppola. The story itself is hung in a somewhat contrived narrative device. Two sisters are separated, pine for each other, both believing the other to be in Europe, when in fact both are stuck in Rio, facing their personal challenges. It’s all slightly clunky, with the separate narratives evolving side by side. There’s one lovely moment of dramatic tension, when their respective offspring meet unknowingly, but as the device is spun out over two hours is starts to lose traction. However, in a sense it feels as though the narrative is just a hook upon which the director can hang his primary theme, which is the role of the female in society. One sister, Euridice, battles to be able to continue playing the piano, at which she is extremely talented, in spite of being a mother. The other, Gilda, fashions a life for herself despite being driven out of the family home, working in a factory, eschewing the role of prostitute which at one point beckoned. The film is full of physicality. Convincing sex scenes, filmed from a female perspective, a gruelling childbirth scene, and more. In these visceral moments, the film becomes more than the story, painting a vivid portrait of womanhood in an evolving Rio. 

bacurau (w&d juliano dornelles, kleber mendonça filho)

Bacurau is a curious case of the film itself being far better than its script. How can this be, you might say? But the truth is that the script has more loose ends than you can count. The female protagonist who hardly figures in the plot. The water crisis that isn’t left just unresolved, but also forgotten. The shallow attempts at characterisation of the mercenaries. Udo Kier’s motivation for turning on his own. And there’s plenty more. However, somehow, in spite of all this, Bacurau more or less triumphs. Firstly because it uses the classic trope of the Western, and turns it on its head, making the gringos the bad guys. Secondly, and above all, because of the portrayal of the small town of Bacurau itself, with its large cast of diverse and engaging characters, its communal events, its resident DJ, its solidarity. The last element is perhaps the most telling. As mentioned, it looks as though Teresa is set up to be the protagonist as she arrives back in the threatened town, but her narrative is never developed. Instead it’s the town itself which emerges as the protagonist, the town which fights back and triumphs over the gringo invaders. The narrative is wafer-thin but a wafer filled with ice cream. There are so many details to enjoy, so many telling moments, and above all such conviction in the acting and the directors’ capacity to capture what the interior of Brazil is really like whilst adhering to a genre format. 

the alienist (machado de assis, tr william l grossman)

Machado de Assis’ slender tome is an effortless masterpieces that feels as though it was written in a day, to be read in an hour. It tells the simple story of the apparently cultured man of science, Simão Bacamarte, who sets up an asylum to study madness in a small Brazilian town. The scientist gradually starts locking up anyone he deems insane, including his wife, bringing about a revolution. However, the revolutionaries also believe in science, and as a result they don’t lock Bacamarte up, or even release his prisoners. Finally, Bacamarte reaches the reasonably logical conclusion that in a mad world, the sane are the truly crazy people, and starts locking people up on that basis. Neither rationality nor irrationality can be trusted. Bacamarte is a brilliant charlatan so convinced of his own genius that he has succeeded in convincing everyone else. If ever you wanted an allegory for what is occurring in present day Brazil, this could scarcely be bettered: Bolsonaro’s Brazil seems to be caught up in the spectacle of re-enacting de Assis’ thesis. In addition it goes to the heart of the issues surrounding notions of scientific rationality as a basis for claiming rights over what might be deemed sanity; an issue which is hot-wired into the Brazilian psyche. As perfect a short novel as you could hope to find, one that reveals that alternative literary strands were alive in kicking in Latin America long before the arrival of Marquez, Borges et al. 

o método (d. liliana sulzbach, carlos roberto franke, w denise marchi)

Liliana Sulzbach and Carlos Roberto Franke’s film is a documentary about the art of documentary. They speak to approximately ten documentary makers from Germany and Brazil, exploring the individual methodologies and motivations. There are two ways of looking at this project. On the one hand it would make a great learning tool. There’s a clear focus on the role of documentary as a tool of social activism, something which unites the filmmakers from both countries. Brazil is a country with multiple social issues and the presence of the Amazon represents an ongoing challenge to Brazilian filmmakers: how to interact and document this vast territory which is constantly under hidden attack from the forces of capital. All the German fillmmakers appeared to be addressing social issues, such as the origin of cheap clothing in the West or the mining industry (one director who had made a film about Bauhaus seemed like the exception brought in to prove the rule). Any student contemplating the range and reason for their potential enquiry would benefit from watching El Metodo. On the other hand, the film adopts a studiously asceptic format. It is composed from talking head interviews with the subjects interspersed with clips from their films. The playfulness of Varda or the dramatic interventions of Morris or the idiosyncrasy of Herzog is eschewed in favour of a wilfully limited use of the format’s aesthetic capacity. In a film which made a point of enquiring into the motivation of documentary filmmakers and how this tied in with their ambitions, the filmmakers’ own technique comes under scrutiny and one questions why they have chosen such an orthodox, conservative approach to relate their point of view. 

the third bank of the river: power and survival in the twenty-first century amazon (w chris feliciano arnold)

Feliciano Arnold’s book is the result of various trips to the Amazon, during the period between the 2014 World Cup and the Rio Olympics of 2016. Using Manaus as a base, the book is composed of several strands. The fate of the indigenous peoples is a central plank, but this is incorporated into a concise understanding of the forces at work in the Amazon, much of them finding their focal point in Manaus. Illegal deforestation, drug smuggling, dam building, mining, and the never-ending conflict between ‘virgin territory’ and the pressing demands of modernity. One of the most effective aspects of Feliciano’s book is the way in which he begins to establish the back story behind the myth of the ‘primitive’ tribe, explaining how tribes located in what is now Brazil have used the jungle as a safe haven to retreat to, a haven which has always been eroded but even more so now, when mining concessions and drug smuggling routes mean that the non-native people are penetrating deeper and deeper into the jungle. The book is also very effective on the debate over whether ‘unconctacted’ tribes should be left to their own devices or whether there’s a moral obligation to try and protect them before danger strikes. It’s a discursive read, with some engaging personal touches. Feliciano, (with his Brazilian blood), isn’t scared to go into the bars where the gringos wouldn’t normally go, and knock on doors which few gringo journalists would be interested or willing to approach. It’s this capacity to go deep not just into the jungle, but into more ‘Brazilian’ world which is parasitically feeding off the jungle which lends the book an added dimension. The line between the “virgin” Amazon and encroaching “civilisation” is one of the most urgent pressure points on the planet, but this can’t be studied from above. The forces which determine where this line is drawn (and it’s being constantly redrawn) can only be understood on the ground, talking as far as is possible to the ones who are pushing that line further and further into territory that was previously the preserve of the indigenous peoples. 

chico: artista brasileiro (w&d miguel faria jr., w. diana vasconcellos)

One of the pleasures of having a local cinema is that you get to see films on the big screen you otherwise might not. I’m not a particular fan of Chico Barque, but it was a Monday night after football, there was nothing to eat in the house, so we moseyed out to Cinemateca in the middle of a rainstorm, enjoying the privilege of being able to take in a film without having to make any real effort. If I lived in London I wouldn’t have made it. It’s not the most extravagant of privileges, but let’s name it for what it is. The idea of privilege feels relevant to Chico Barque, a golden boy blessed with charm and looks who hit the big time at the age of 22, coming from a well-connected upper-middle class background. There’s not much regarding this in the film, but you can feel it behind the singer’s eyes, a sense of ‘how did I get to live such a charmed life?’ Of course, there’s no such thing as a charmed life, and his time in exile and participation in the struggle against the dictatorship becomes a key element in his story. The documentary functions on three levels. Firstly there’s an extended interview with the subject which is played out over the film’s near two hours. Then there are recurring versions of his songs, sung somewhat ironically in the Teatro Poiera, by celebrated Brazilian singers. All of this is broken up with archive footage. Then, towards the end, a sub-plot appears, perhaps, which is the remarkable story of Barque’s lost German brother. The camera crew follows him to Berlin for a fascinating if slightly tacked-on postscript where he discovers footage of the lost, now-dead brother. It feels as though there’s a whole other film here which the filmmakers have glimpsed, aware that it wasn’t going to fit into their film’s structure, but one with such an added poetic dimension that they felt the need to shoe-horn it in anyhow.

All of which is not to say that Chico: Artista Brasileiro isn’t a thoroughly competent and effective piece of documentary making. Above all for the way it recounts, perhaps even more than Barque’s musical genius, the history of a vast country and culture which exists, to a certain extent, at the margins. Barque himself relates a couple of self-effacing anecdotes about how little known he is in much of the world, in contrast to his iconic status in his homeland. The film offers an insight into the transformation of the country over the course of fifty years, from the post-war period to the fall of the dictatorship, revealing how much Barque’s art was formed and influenced by politics, in spite of the fact that by the end the singer says he’s seeking to retreat from engaging in any kind of political discourse. The film was initially released in 2015: it would be fascinating to know whether that position has changed now that politics have so rudely come back to haunt Brazil.

resistance [julian fuks tr. daniel hahn]

Fuks’ novel is another of those tricksy texts that feel as though it’s autobiographical although it’s quite possibly not. The kind of text which makes one want to reach for Wikipedia to avoid the risk of saying something stupid. Which is to say that it would be easy to write here “Resistance is the story of the author’s struggle to come to terms with the cruelties of the Argentine dictatorship from which his parents fled before they settled in Brazil, where Fuks was born.” This is what the book feels like it’s about, but this might just be the skill of the writing which feels so convincingly first person that one can’t help but think this is a quasi autobiographical tale. Something which is reinforced by the closing chapter, where ‘the author’s’ parents comment on the factual inaccuracies in ‘the author’s’ version of events. Are these ‘parents’ really Fuks’ parents? Or are they just modelled on his parents? Or have they got nothing to do with them, or him, at all? We’re at the squeaky end of fiction, Rousseau’s Confessions, Proust’s memoirs, the sea wherein truth and fiction swim around each other like sharks. 

This matters principally because, in a tale about the consequences of dictatorship, authenticity feels important. Which might still be the point. Fuks’ elliptical novel details the narrator’s relationship with his adopted brother, who might or might not be the child of a woman who was ‘disappeared’ by the dictatorship. The narrator visits the headquarters of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the mothers who have maintained a stoic, unflagging search; firstly to discover the fate of their missing children and then to re-locate their adopted grandchildren. Crimes that have reverberated through the generations. In Resistance, there’s a double irony in that the narrator’s parents, who adopt his brother, are left-wingers who have fled Argentina. The novel, again elliptically, explores with little specificity the way in which the narrator’s brother struggles to fit in, is always something of an outsider, no matter that he’s within a warm, loving family environment. The implication is that the adopted brother has somehow been saddled with the psychological burden of the Argentinian dictatorship’s crimes, whether he’s the child of political prisoners or not. In so doing, there are moments where the novel feels awkward: is Fuks suggesting that adoption as a rule tends towards this sense of psychological displacement? Or only in the event of the adopted child having been born into a state of emergency or crisis of which the child is unaware? 

The measured tone, reminiscent of the nouvel roman style of Chefjec or Toussaint, lends distance to the tale, which perambulates around Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo. Of itself the tone suggests that recovery from the crimes of history is feasible for the second generation, a measured sense of distance can be achieved; or at least it would do so if it were not for the nagging awkwardness of the narrative, which seems reluctant to ever pin down its subject matter, offering clues to the family conflict without ever showing the whole picture, like a jigsaw puzzle wherein some of the pieces can never be found.

el proceso (d. maria augusta ramos)

El Proceso follows, over the course of 140 minutes, the events surrounding Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment and ultimate removal from the presidency of Brazil. Using news footage and fly-on-the-wall footage from Dilma’s legal team, the documentary meticulously charts the process leading to what many have described as a coup. 

How should art deal with the great affairs of state? There have been a variety of approaches in recent years, from the West Wing, a US approach which turns politics into a melodrama (an attitude which US politics has subsequently decided works effectively and has chosen to adopt as a methodology); to Hare’s stageplays about the Labour party; to Santiago Mitre’s parallelism in El Estudiante. There has also been in British theatre, a wave of “verbatim” theatre, which seeks to recreate events surrounding, for example, the Chilcott Enquiry. TV has since gone further, with the likes of Peter Morgan doing the Deal between Blair and Brown, and so on, an approach which has been hijacked by Netflix, which has recently screened a drama about Lula. There will be a host more. Within many societies, drama is a more effective means of communicating events than documentary, because the cameras aren’t often present when the events of history are being thrashed out. Those who make history prefer to do so in the shadows.

Which is where Ramos’ documentary is all the more remarkable, because, having obtained access to Rousseff’s legal team, she offers an insight which normally only drama might afford. The characters around which the narrative is built are never fleshed out: they don’t need to be. We get to know the dogged defence lawyer, Senator Limbergh and Gleisi Hoffmann who front Dilma’s campaign, observing them both behind-the-scenes and as they make their case with dignity, in spite of the fact they know they’re leading a doomed charge. The votes against Dilma were never going to be altered; once the mechanism of impeachment has trundled into gear, there’s no reversing the process. Something the team grasp, but which they never let defeat them; they still have a role to play within the historical terms of events, to defend their President as honourably as possible, and in so doing, show up the dishonour of those who condemn her.

Ramos’ subjects ensure there’s no issue about which side she’s on; there’s no pretence at objectivity, something which political drama tends to aspire to. If your sympathies aren’t with Rousseff, you’re not going to enjoy this film. But if you’re intrigued by the machinations of history, by the mechanics of a neo-democratic coup, then this is an absorbing and terrifying account, brilliantly rendered with a minimum of hyperbole and a maximum of detail. It’s also a cautionary tale for the 21st century: liberal democracies are just as vulnerable today as they were in the sixties and the seventies. Only, scarily, the opponents of these democracies have decided to employ subtler tools to undermine them.  When the mechanisms of state have become overwhelmingly corrupt, how does anyone stop the gravy train? 

híbridos, los espíritus de brasil (d. vincent moon y priscilla telmon)

Híbridos is an immersive documentary, which explores the connection between spirituality and music in Brazil. There’s not a word of dialogue. The film floats, effortlessly, from place to place. The camera is a vivid player, getting right in there as as its subjects dance or dream. From time to time, the camera appears to becomes part of the dance. The frame is almost always tight. A mass of people cling to a rope in Recife and we see their impassioned faces, barely getting a glimpse of the architecture or the setting. We are another face, crammed in to this ecstatic process. Just occasionally the camera pulls back and shows a crowd in Rio or Salvador from a distance, but it’s no more than a breather, before it plunges back into the maelstrom. A group of barefooted dancers on what appears to be waste land on a hill in Sao Paulo dance for Jesus, the city just discernible in the dying light behind. A vibrant, African-tinged dance erupts in a tiny space in the North East, men and women jostling for space; a group of what appears to be Ayahuasca users enter into an orgasmic trance, their faces contorted and covered in mud. The film ends with a lengthy sequence of a shaman, struggling to contain whatever it is that has possessed him, in a hut in the middle of nowhere. There are few countries that have as diverse a range of influences, both musical and spiritual, as Brazil. African, evangelical, native traditions blend and merge. The cumulative effect is disorientating, stupefying, terrifying, any of these words. It’s a remarkable film and testament to the power of the documentary to conjure worlds within worlds with nothing more than an elastic camera, high-end sound recording and a savagely brilliant edit. 

aquellos dos (compañía luna lunera)

Four men come on stage and start to warm up. They stop and talk to the audience. The house lights stay on. Has the play started? Has it not? Will it ever? What's it about? The men move about the stage. There's a fluidity to everything. A story starts to emerge. Two men work in a Kafkaesque office. One day they start to talk about films over coffee. They will become friends. They might become lovers. They might not. They are sacked. They are released. 

This is an exercise in loose-limbed storytelling, even though the story is little more than a Macguffin for the company’s stagecraft. The stage is cut to ribbons by the four bodies, then it's reconstructed and cut to ribbons again. Life is captured in all its repetitive glory. Days become weeks become months become a story. We remember what it's like to work somewhere, how long it takes to make a friendship, how complex a friendship can be. The show, adapted from a novel by Caio Fernando Abreu, is part narrative, part dance. It restructures reality in its own image and makes us wonder how we would tell the story of our lives. Not the show of the highlights, but the show of the mundane in-between bits. How all those ephemeral moments might be captured, documented, celebrated. All the moments we have lived and already forgotten. 

the father’s daughter (mulher do pai) (w&d cristiane oliveira)

The Father’s Daughter is set in Brazil, near the Uruguayan border, in a sleepy, nothing-happens kind of place. Nalu, 16, lives with her blind father and grandmother. When the grandmother dies, her relationship with her father becomes more complicated. She doesn’t want the responsibility of looking after him, but she’s stuck with it. He eavesdrops on her phone conversations as she tells her friend about her trysts with a roguish Uruguayan trader. Into the mix comes a professor, Rosario, played by Veronica Perrota, who develops a bond first with Nalu, then with her father. 

There are moments when the film threatens to take risks. The jealousy that exists within the father-daughter relationship is teased out as far as it can go, with the faintest suggestion of incest, an incest that never occurs, but which the remote rural world, beyond the scope of internet or roaming, might engender. The father grows as a character through the course of the film, becoming more intriguing as it goes on. There are layers to the narrative which are teased out. At the same time, the film sits within a recognisable genre of slow-burner rural Latino melodrama. This is a world of  narrowed ambition, thwarted hopes and minor epiphanies. Perhaps it’s not so far removed from a film such as Andrea Arnold’s Fishtank, another coming of age tale which seeks to capture a young woman’s struggle to overcome the limitations of the environment she has been born into. It’s a work of studied social realism, with few fireworks, but offers a solid, convincing insight into this semi-isolated corner of the world.

all dogs are blue [rodrigo de souza leāo]

The notes at the close of the novel, written by Blue Dog’s original publisher, reveal a great deal. The author Souza Leāo suffered from schizophrenia, and was frequently in hospital. All dogs Are Blue belongs to the pantheon of literature which lurks on the edge of society, a voice from the other side, as Foucault might have said. The book details the life and times of an inmate of a psychiatric ward, who is accompanied by his blue dog as well as a whole host of other friends, some of them imaginary, some of them fellow patients. Two of these are called Rimbaud and Baudelaire. The narrator lives in Rio, coming from a seemingly middle-class family. His poeticised prose refers to the hybrid nature of his nation’s history: European, African and Indigenous. A mixture which feels, in his voice, unstable, on the point of explosion. At the same time, it’s a carnival of language, (perhaps reminiscent of Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World), a delirious roller-coaster of words. There’s no plot to speak of, just a mosaic of unhappy magic. Like poetry, this is a novel which no doubt rewards repeated reading. The translation, by Deborah Levy, is effective. We go into the narrator’s mind and dance with him for a while. He might be from Rio, but he could be from Shanghai, Essex or Moscow. There’s a universality to ‘madness’, a culture which unites above and beyond geography.  

a vida privada dos hipopótamos (maíra bühler, matias mariani)

This is a suitably Latin American Gordian knot of a film. Is it a documentary or a fiction?  Is it a film about Latin America or North America? Among other artful steers. The film is constructed around a lengthy interview with a North American, Christopher Kirk, who is, ostensibly, in prison in Brazil. The filmmakers state that they discovered Kirk whilst researching a project about gringos in jail in South America. Kirk proceeds to tell an elaborate tale about his relationship with 'V', a half Japanese beauty he met in Bogota. The more he extrapolates, the less believable his story becomes. 

The filmmakers speak to people who knew the incarcerated American in his earlier life. The film is assembled with clips from YouTube and photos and video clips purportedly taken from Kirk's hard drive. There's also a curious segment when Kirk appears on local TV after a friend looking after his flat whilst he's away wraps all his possessions, down to the toilet paper, in aluminium foil. When Kirk heads ‘south’, his dull demeanour changes, reflecting the changing landscape. Bogota and Seattle are chalk and cheese. Bit by bit, the film suggests, the Latin world takes over. Kirk’s description of “V” ends up suggesting that she might, in fact, be a kind of alias for the exciting uncertainty he discovers when he heads south of the Rio Grande. An uncertainty that appears not just in his surroundings, but also within himself. 

Kirk would clearly appear to be an unreliable narrator, something backed up by his old friends. However, what the audience doesn't expect is that the filmmakers themselves are also unreliable narrators. The further down the rabbit hole we go, the more unstable the ground becomes. Is there any truth at all to what we’re watching? Does a Youtube clip of Chris Kirk on the Brazilian border really mean Chris Kirk ever visited or was even near to the Brazilian border? In this way the narrative ties in effectively with current preoccupations about the authenticity of data in the digital age. it also makes for a fascinating, uncertain film, one that tantalises with notions of a “truth’ which remains constantly out of reach.