Brazilian Filmmaker Research Articles

The Impact of Netflix Co-Production Models on Brazilian Film Narratives: Negotiating Artistic Integrity and Innovation

This paper examines the impact of Netflix’s co-production models on Brazilian film narratives, focusing on the negotiation between artistic integrity and innovation in the streaming era. Netflix’s partnerships with Brazilian filmmakers have introduced new opportunities for global exposure, higher production quality, and genre diversification, but they have also raised challenges related to creative autonomy and cultural representation. Through an analysis of Netflix’s financial investments, storytelling strategies, and global distribution practices, this study explores how Brazilian filmmakers balance local authenticity with the demands of a global audience. Case studies of notable productions, such as 3% and Sintonia, highlight the successes and tensions within these collaborations. Additionally, the paper considers the broader implications of Netflix’s practices for the global film industry, proposing recommendations to preserve artistic integrity while fostering equitable and sustainable co-production models.

Futures Imperfect

A String of Pearls (2002) is Camille Billops and James Hatch’s sixth and final film, concluding a trilogy that began with Suzanne, Suzanne (1982). Now dedicated to the men of Billops’s family, the feature’s affiliation to self-representational practices is woven in a refracted and collectivized way, building bridges between the private sphere and the social issues that permeate it. This essay analyzes how the film creates a sense of community in an extended and constantly changing manner, carrying in its wake a dense dimension of temporality. For this investigation, I will present the particularities of the film’s affiliation with the field of documentary, which highlights an aspect of experimentation, and refer to concepts of Afro-Brazilian origin and the work of contemporary Brazilian filmmaker Tila Chitunda, indicating approaches that go beyond the immediate context of these films.

Amazon Journeys and Poetic Re-Discoveries in Jan Conn’s 'Jaguar Rain' and Malu de Martino’s 'Margaret Mee e a Flor da Lua'

The year 2023 marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of botanical artist Margaret Mee’s final expedition to the Amazon. On this trip, she was at last able to paint the rare night-flowering of Selenicereus wittii, commonly known as the Amazon moonflower. Such an accomplishment was not only significant due to the rare nature of the event, but also because it was the final piece created by an artist who renewed the practice of botanical painting. Originally from Britain, Mee lived in Brazil for more than thirty years, embarking on fifteen expeditions to the Amazon region between 1956 and 1988, painting while travelling in dugout canoes deep in the forest and becoming a fervent activist for the protection of the environment. Her work has influenced many artists, e cologists, and biologists, and has served as inspiration for literary and filmic creations. In 2006, Canadian poet Jan Conn published Jaguar Rain: The Margaret Mee Poems, in which she poetically recreates Mee’s journeys to the Amazon. As both a scientist and a poet who has also extensively travelled in the region, Conn reimagines Mee’s wondrous encounters while situating them as part of a tradition of travel and exploration in South America. A few years later, in 2012, the documentary Margaret Mee e a Flor da Lua, directed by Brazilian filmmaker Malu de Martino, was premiered. In the film, Martino reconstructs Mee’s final journey to the Amazon in search of the moonflower while also reinstating the artist’s important contributions as an artist, environmentalist, and contemporary explorer. The connections between the biographical, poetic, artistic, and professional Mee are closely woven throughout the documentary, which can be seen as inserted in a new documentary tradition, less analytical and more poetic, in which notions of truth, history, and reality are problematised and rendered through different lenses. Bearing in mind that both Conn and Martino re-read Mee’s journeys through the tropes of exploration and discovery, which are commonly associated with imperial practices and colonial narratives of the New World, in this paper, we propose to discuss in which ways these tropes are brought into context and problematised, especially in relation to the depiction of Amazonian nature.

The Brazilian Eisenstein (1961–1981)

ABSTRACT Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, Latin American filmmakers and filmgoers began to interpret and adapt early Soviet avant-garde cinema of the 1920s in an unprecedented fashion, extending its half-life in innovative ways. In this context, Brazil is a generative but seldom explored site. This article traces the Brazilian reception of Soviet cinematic poetics through the shifting approaches to Sergei Eisenstein in the filmography of Leon Hirszman (1937–1987). Eisenstein’s approaches to montage would shape Hirszman from his first student film to the workerist cinema that characterized his late filmography. Like his contemporary Glauber Rocha (1939–1981)—after Hirszman, the Brazilian filmmaker most marked by Eisenstein—Hirszman tranculturated the avant-garde postrevolutionary Soviet film for the truncated revolutionary context of Brazil. Changing and emphasizing different elements in Eisenstein’s understanding of montage, Hirszman consistently depicted it as a capacious opportunity for both capturing and transforming the world: registering justices and multiplying a cinematic off-screen where anti-capitalist solidarities might flourish. His experimental filmmaking praxis also suggests how Eisenstein’s montage method (activating disparate or contradictory contexts through juxtaposition) produces a paradoxical ground for comparison, a poetics of the urgent untimely, rather than either belated or diffusionist accounts of world cinema.

Alberto Cavalcanti: Experimental Realism in Coal Face

The examination of Brazilian filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti’s contribution to documentary history will be undertaken here through a close analysis of his early film "Coal Face" (1935), which depicts the lives of coal workers in England. This film will be juxtaposed with two other significant documentaries from the same period. The first is "Industrial Britain" (Robert Flaherty, 1931/1933), and the second is "Housing Problems" (Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey, 1935). This article delves into a discussion that, despite being produced during the same period, these films exhibit notable disparities in their aesthetical approaches to portraying reality.

Memórias femininas da luta armada no Brasil e em Portugal

Abstract Literature and cinema can serve as historical documents, bearing potent testimonial content that aims to transmit the experiences and memories of those who have lived them. This analysis centers on the narrative of women who were active participants in armed organizations during the military dictatorship in Brazil and the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal, between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, and that later chose to make public their memories and experiences. Two works are analyzed: the 1989 documentary Que Bom te ver viva [How Nice to See You Alive] by Brazilian filmmaker Lucia Murat, and the 2012 book Mulheres de Armas: História das Brigadas Revolucionárias [Women in Arms: History of the Revolutionary Brigades], by Portuguese journalist Isabel Lindim. The testimonies presented in these works make explicit the differences in the political processes experienced in the two countries, as well as the specificity of histories and memories narrated by the women who were interviewed. These differences are not only indicative of the distinct political characteristics of the two countries but also reflect the specific contexts of remembrance at stake in the book and film under analysis.

Picture-Skin, Music-Muscle: The Intersemiotic/ Intermedia Body of Olney São Paulo’s Manhã Cinzenta

The film Manhã cinzenta (1969), by Brazilian filmmaker Olney São Paulo, is a fictional documentary in a short film, which works with fictional space scenes and real elements (clipping from newspapers, movie posters, radio news, images from student marches, and police repression). As a political-artistic form of resistance to the 1964 Brazilian civil-military dictatorship, it is a manifest against authoritarian regimes, also referring to the Latin American dictatorships of 1960-1970. Based on the work of Rajewsky and Clüver, we analyzed, from the intermediate texture, the relationship between image and music, respectively, “epidermis and muscle” by Wingstedt, threads of an artistic and political texture as elements of the constitution of a multimedia body: metaphor of resistance. The film can contribute to breaking with the logic of domination - a logic that is structured by the monopoly of discourse about the past, which in current times has been trying to extinguish from history, from memory, the violent event of the Brazilian civil-military coup. For this reason, it is important to study it, due to the importance of this film as one of the most significant films about resisting, having also been a metaphor for the life of the filmmaker himself.

Ficções do real no documentário Era o Hotel Cambridge - Eliana Caffé (2016)

This communication aims to analyze the documentary made by Brazilian filmmaker Eliana Caffé, The Cambridge Squatter, made in 2016, from the point of view of reality and fiction, in view of the hybridization of genres proposed by the filmmaker. Caffé in his feature film mixes professional and social actors intertwining stories of migrants and refugees who find themselves living in what was once a luxury hotel in the downtown area of São Paulo, the Hotel Cambridge. For different reasons, they are in a situation of social vulnerability and in this collective space, they have one of the few possibilities of having a house, as well as food, in addition to being able to share stories and experiences ranging from refugees from the war in Congo to Syrians who left their country. The film also presents the situation of Brazilians, especially Northeasterners, who migrate from their places of origin in search of better living conditions, seeing this possibility in the city of São Paulo. In its political bias, it presents the various movements and NGOs involved in the struggle for the right to housing, and the problem of the abandonment of downtown and being occupied by “homeless” people. There are many themes punctuated in Caffé’s film, this communication will mainly address issues linked to this representation of poverty, the vulnerability of these people, and their struggle for a space of housing and social dignity, as well as the relationship and imbrication between the real and the fictional.

From Cinéfondation’s Résidence to film production: The experience of Brazilian filmmakers in an international labour market

Departing from the theoretical tradition of Marxist critique of Political Economy, the article depicts the objective working conditions of three Brazilian filmmakers in an international environment of film production. Also, by carrying out in-depth interviews with them, we analyse their responses to such conditions. We begin with their experience in Cinéfondation Résidence, a programme attached to the Cannes Film Festival dedicated to the development of a screenplay for a first or second long-feature film. In a second stage, we investigate how these professionals deal, after their stay in Résidence, with the contradictions of a labour market marked by precarity. Our conclusions point out the economic logic of a filmmaker’s residency like Résidence that functions as an intermediary between new talents and the film production market, but an intermediation not devoid of contradictions. Thus, we also expose how filmmakers must reconcile the contingencies of this market with their artistic and personal aims in order to make their films.

Memories from the Darkness in the Films of Pedro Costa and Affonso Uchôa

This essay analyses realist works from contemporary world cinema wherein the representation of space-time is directly affected by the color black, referring to both night and dark shadows. It investigates exactly how darkness participates in moments when the filmed subjects remember traumatic events and confront them through their courageous retellings. My hypothesis is that the color black converts the space—realistic and concerning the characters’ present time—into a place where different temporalities coexist. Through a comparative analysis of films made by the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa and the Brazilian filmmaker Affonso Uchôa in the past two decades, I show how this modulation in space-time produced through color has a political meaning, since the narrated memories are related to a social experience of class and race.

Professional and personal strategies of documentary filmmakers in Brazil: the case of the State of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais.


 
 
 Between 2012 and 2019, this qualitative sociological research was part of a documentary "boom" moment in Brazil, in terms of production and international recognition. Faced with a bottleneck in terms of their distribution, a growing number of festivals have opened up for documentaries, not counting the historical festival "É tudo Verdade" (São Paulo). This period also corresponds to a time when attempts at policies in favor of documentary films were made by the Federation and the Ministry of Culture (MinC) – public channel TV Brasil, TV Cultura, Doc.TV... These various advances have allowed the expression of a "black" cinema (Joel Zito Araujo), LGBT concerns (Karla Holanda), women’s rights (Helena Solberg and Susanna Lira) and the possibility for indigenous people to seize digital tools to reflect their own realities (Vincent Carelli, Video nas aldeias). Thus, while the Brazilian authorities were carrying out unfinished policies facing the weight of the private oligopolistic sector, it was interesting to analyze how documentary filmmakers developed their professional strategies. From this perspective, fourteen directors were the subject of semi-structured interviews in the state of Rio de Janeiro and three in Minas Gerais. In addition, producers and festival managers were also contacted. But the arrival of the Bolsonaro government caused a real rift. Against a backdrop of cultural war, fake news aimed at discrediting artistic circles, the takeover of the National Cinema Agency (ANCINE) and the abandonment of the São Paulo film library, cuts from major corporate sponsors, and beyond, Brazilian documentary filmmakers have found themselves strangers in their own country.
 
 

Reciprocal narratives in Que bom te ver viva (Lúcia Murat, 1989)

Directed by Brazilian filmmaker Lúcia Murat, Que bom te ver viva [How nice to see you alive] (1989) interlaces the testimonies of eight female political prisoners with a monologue voiced by an anonymous female fictional character. All allude to the experience of torture under the military dictatorial regime in Brazil. Given that Murat was a militant student imprisoned and tortured during the dictatorship, the film appears to have an autobiographical motivation. I argue, however, that the interlacing of fictional monologue and ‘real’ testimonies effaces this motivation. Rather, the intersection between fictional and testimonial accounts offers a reciprocal recognition between interviewees and filmmaker, allowing for the inscription of these individual stories into the historical narrative. I also argue that this reciprocal recognition is anchored in the feminist practice of storytelling, practised in consciousness-raising feminist groups in the 1960s and 1970s. Adriana Cavarero’s philosophy of narration underpins my analysis.

Helena Ignez, an Incendiary Monster of Brazilian Cinema

Patrícia Mourão de Andrade offers an impassioned portrait of the actress and filmmaker Helena Ignez, a foundational figure in Brazilian filmmaking of the 1960s and 1970s. Long ignored by a national historiography blinded by its own patriarchal distortions, Ignez has only gained recognition in the last fifteen years for her contributions to Brazilian cinema. Moving behind the camera for the first time in 2005, Ignez has created a body of work that brings the anarchic spirit of the Cinema Marginal movement of the late 1960s to Brazilian cinema of the 2000s. This article offers a comprehensive survey and assessment of Ignez’s career, from her first film, O pátio (1959), directed by Glauber Rocha, who became her first husband, to her memorable performances of the 1960s, to her years of political exile, to her recent, late renaissance.

Ambiguity and Ambivalence: an Issue for the Subjective Dynamics in the Relation between Language and Affection.

This article stems from an interest taken in discussing the usage of the terms ambivalence and ambiguity, which are very present in Psychology's publications and savoir faire. It is important to reiterate that in common sense and even in scientific publications these terms are often used as synonyms or notions of little conceptual delimitation. The relevance of such differentiation is proposed once these notions participates of the emergence of the new in human subjective experience, and, in a methodological approach, ambiguity and ambivalence are dimensions that leads the researcher goes beyond a repetitive sterile description of the subject's speech, moving towards new perspectives of the psychological data. This paper aims to retrieve the qualifying power of such notions by making a broader reflection on the functions of language in the production of interpretive realities. We also propose to bring up a reflection about ambiguity in the construction of meaning and to reiterate ambivalences as inherent to human nature, its affective record and the process of human becoming. As a way to explain the proposed themes, we will analyse an excerpt from the documentary "Últimas Conversas", produced by the Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho, in which high school students from public state schools in Rio de Janeiro tell their stories, speaking of dreams and shared challenges. The character Rafaela was selected for this article because of the emergence of unspeakable emotions from her narrative about an expected future as a promise of reconciliation with the alterity of her life story.

Review: Feminino e plural: Mulheres no cinema brasileiro (Female and Plural: Women on Brazilian Cinema), edited by Karla Holanda and Marina Cavalcanti Tedesco; Mulheres atrás das câmeras: As cineastas brasileiras de 1930 a 2018 (Women behind the Camera: Brazilian Filmmakers, 1930–2018), edited by Luiza Lusvarghi and Camila Vieira da Silva and Mulheres de cinema (Women of Cinema), edited by Karla

Book Review| December 08 2020 Review: Feminino e plural: Mulheres no cinema brasileiro (Female and Plural: Women on Brazilian Cinema), edited by Karla Holanda and Marina Cavalcanti Tedesco; Mulheres atrás das câmeras: As cineastas brasileiras de 1930 a 2018 (Women behind the Camera: Brazilian Filmmakers, 1930–2018), edited by Luiza Lusvarghi and Camila Vieira da Silva and Mulheres de cinema (Women of Cinema), edited by Karla Holanda Feminino e plural: Mulheres no cinema brasileiro (Female and Plural: Women on Brazilian Cinema) edited by Karla Holanda and Marina Cavalcanti TedescoMulheres atrás das câmeras: As cineastas brasileiras de 1930 a 2018 (Women behind the Camera: Brazilian Filmmakers, 1930–2018) edited by Luiza Lusvarghi and Camila Vieira da SilvaMulheres de cinema (Women of Cinema) edited by Karla Holanda Lívia Perez Lívia Perez Lívia Perez is a PhD candidate at the University of Sao Paulo, where she is completing a dissertation on Brazilian women filmmakers of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. In 2020, she was a research scholar at UC Santa Cruz. She is also a producer and filmmaker whose films have been screened at Locarno, IDFA, and Hot Docs. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar BOOK DATA Karla Holanda and Marina Cavalcanti Tedesco, eds., Feminino e plural: Mulheres no cinema brasileiro. Campinas: Papirus, 2017. $56.00 paper; $7.43 e-book. 240 pages. Luiza Lusvarghi and Camila Vieira da Silva, eds., Mulheres atrás das câmeras: As cineastas brasileiras de 1930 a 2018. São Paulo: Editora Estação Liberdade, 2019. $60.00 paper; $8.99 e-book. 368 pages. Karla Holanda, ed., Mulheres de cinema. Rio de Janeiro: Numa Editora, 2019. $72.00 paper. 412 pages. Film Quarterly (2020) 74 (2): 122–125. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2020.74.2.122 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Lívia Perez; Review: Feminino e plural: Mulheres no cinema brasileiro (Female and Plural: Women on Brazilian Cinema), edited by Karla Holanda and Marina Cavalcanti Tedesco; Mulheres atrás das câmeras: As cineastas brasileiras de 1930 a 2018 (Women behind the Camera: Brazilian Filmmakers, 1930–2018), edited by Luiza Lusvarghi and Camila Vieira da Silva and Mulheres de cinema (Women of Cinema), edited by Karla Holanda. Film Quarterly 8 December 2020; 74 (2): 122–125. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2020.74.2.122 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search BOOK DATA Karla Holanda and Marina Cavalcanti Tedesco, eds., Feminino e plural: Mulheres no cinema brasileiro. Campinas: Papirus, 2017. $56.00 paper; $7.43 e-book. 240 pages. Luiza Lusvarghi and Camila Vieira da Silva, eds., Mulheres atrás das câmeras: As cineastas brasileiras de 1930 a 2018. São Paulo: Editora Estação Liberdade, 2019. $60.00 paper; $8.99 e-book. 368 pages. Karla Holanda, ed., Mulheres de cinema. Rio de Janeiro: Numa Editora, 2019. $72.00 paper. 412 pages. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

With the Alma no Olho

In an impressionistic, episodic appreciation, Janaína Oliveira reconsiders the legacy of Black Brazilian filmmaker Zózimo Bulbul. She argues that Bulbul’s status as a pioneer for black Brazilian cinema does not reside in historical chronology, but rather in the aesthetic and narrative advances accomplished by his short film, Alma no olho (Soul in the Eye), in which he also starred. Having endured almost forty years of neglect by the Brazilian film establishment, Alma no olho is now being taken up again as a reference point by a new generation of Black Brazilian filmmakers.

The Impossible Embrace

In the twentieth century, the Black Brazilian filmmakers who managed to accumulate a substantial body of work were few and far between, with a striking number of Black directors succeeding in making only one or a handful of films. Juliano Gomes examines how this landscape has changed in recent years, prompted by a new generation of film school graduates and reflected in landmark events such as the “Soul in the Eye” program at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2018, in which at least a quarter of the program’s films were made by students. His article focuses on two films representative of these changes: Ilha (2018), whose codirectors Ary Rosa and Glenda Nicácio met in the cinema course at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia, and Travessia (2017), an award-winning student film by Safira Moreira.

Helena Solberg: uma cineasta brasileira na televisão norte-americana

Este ensaio circunscreve o seguinte argumento: as ideias de Raymond Williams sobre a televisão como forma e experiência cultural ampliam a compreensão sobre o período em que a cineasta brasileira Helena Solberg dirigiu diversos documentários para uma emissora de televisão norte-americana na década de 1980. Para sustentar este argumento, nos apoiamos em análises tecidas por Raymond Williams em Television (1974) e nas pesquisas sobre a trajetória de Helena Solberg realizadas por Mariana Tavares e Ana Maria Veiga. Como resultado, esperamos explicitar como os documentários dirigidos por Helena, financiados e exibidos pela emissora estadunidense Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), integram usos e práticas televisivas mais democráticas, que a partir de Williams podem ser mais bem contextualizadas e compreendidas.

Por que não existiram grandes cineastas mulheres no Brasil?*

Inspirada no ensaio “Why have there been no great female artists?”, a comunicação se propõe a pensar algumas atualizações das discussões trazidas pelo texto de Linda Nochlin, publicado originalmente em 1971, adaptando o diálogo ao contexto cinematográfico brasileiro até a década de 1970, quando grandes cineastas brasileiros já estavam canonizados pela história do cinema. Por que não há mulheres nesse cânone do cinema no Brasil? O que constitui um grande cineasta? É sobre essas questões que este trabalho vai se debruçar ao enfrentar a afirmação embutida na pergunta do título.

“Meu canto de morte, guerreiros, ouvi”: intermidialidade e tensões do colonialismo em Amélia (2000)

Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo analisar o filme Amélia (2000), escrito e dirigido pela cineasta brasileira Ana Carolina, a partir dos usos diegéticos de formas artísticas, como a poesia romântica I-Juca Pirama, de Gonçalves Dias e o teatro francês de Sarah Bernhardt. De acordo com as proposições da intermidialidade, que investiga as configurações intermidiáticas formadas pelo cruzamento entre cinema e outras artes, almejamos demonstrar como poesia e teatro engendram a construção de novas camadas de sentidos na narrativa fílmica e, consequentemente, remetem a diferentes temporalidades históricas, como o período colonial e os anos 2000. Busca-se, assim, contribuir para aprofundar os estudos sobre a história do cinema de autoria feminina através da compreensão de relações intermidiáticas no cinema brasileiro contemporâneo, em especial, o cinema da Retomada.