More than a film competition, the Cinélatino de Toulouse is an event that unfolds in lectures, meetings with academics and with the audiovisual market. Brazil has been occupying more and more space at this festival, which for 35 years has highlighted the richness and diversity of Latin American cinematography and its concerns. This edition also honors the Cinema Novo movement.
Maria Paula Carvalho, special envoy to Toulouse
This Saturday (25), the traditional trilingual Cinema of Latin America magazine was launched in French, Spanish and Portuguese. Proof of the importance of Brazilian cinema, which this year is also the subject of a parallel exhibition and debates, as explained by producer and filmmaker Rafael Sampaio.
“I believe that at this moment there is an interest not only from here at the festival, but from the world to understand what is happening to Brazil. The last four years have been very difficult. A very controversial and undiplomatic far-right government, which negatively attracted attention to Brazil”, observes the filmmaker. “Cinema, through a plurality of poetic voices, allows the understanding of other perspectives of history and a knowledge that , sometimes, other countries don’t have about our history”, adds Sampaio.
The director of BrLab helped to choose the eight films of the Cycle Brazil, Cinema and Politicsopened this Saturday with the screening of the feature film Mountains of Disordershown out of competition.
With documentary parts and produced scenes, Andrea Tonacci tells the moving story of Carapiru, a Guajá indigenous man who survived the massacre of his tribe and became a refugee in his own country. The indigenous struggle for survival, portrayed in this 2006 feature film, is a current issue in Brazil and the world, as highlighted by Brigitte Neulat, one of Cinélatino’s judges. “The interest is in the universality of the themes, as if our planet was shrinking and that other people’s problems became acute problems for everyone,” she says.
In search of Cinema Novo
In this edition, Cinélatino promotes a dive into the collections of the National Audiovisual Institute of France (INA), in search of Cinema Novo records. From 1966, French television documented this cinematographic movement, as explained by Sylvie Debs, a researcher of Brazilian cinema who will talk about this discovery, on Tuesday (28).
“They are fabulous archives, I didn’t know that in the 1960s more than an hour of interviews were made with all the people of Cinema Novo, Nelson Perereira do Santos, Cacá Digues, Gustavo Dahl, Eduardo Coutinho, etc. And also with critics and filmmakers Frenchmen, such as Louis Marcorelles, Pierre Billard, Edgar Morin who highlighted what was happening in Brazilian cinema”, he says.
“A group of young people really came together against the capitalist Hollywood cinema made in the studios. And with the technological changes, because you had lighter cameras, the famous phrase ‘an idea in the head and a camera in the hand’ could really come true” , explains the expert. “What these young filmmakers wanted to portray was not modern Brazil, the construction of Brasília, but precisely the part of the Brazilian population that was left out, the Northeasterners and the slums in the cities”, concludes Debs.