World Report: Brazil

Box Office: Brazil

The last three weeks of June, pretty much played out like other international markets. The Incredible Hulk (which filmed some scene here locally,) won the weeknd of the 13-15, that was followed by the comedy featuring Steve Carell in Get Smart. Pixar’s Wall-E won the final weekend with a under 6 million take in 44 theaters.

Brazil: At Home

A New Era

From July 5th to 12th, the first edition of the “Paulinia Movie Festival” took place in the city of Paulinia (126 kilometers away from Sao Paulo). The festival had in its competition, the most anticipated Brazilian movies of the year and was a salute to the recent achievements in our national cinema. Apart from the film selection, an important facet to the festival is the inclusion of the project “Magic of the Cinema”, created by the city’s government and intended to transform Brazilian cinema into an important cinematographic pole. The bold project, based on taxes allowances, already counts with a top of line structure – including studios, a cinema school, the museum of TV and radio and a pompous theater, inspired in the LA’s Kodak Theatre.

Paulinia is a small city in the interior of the state of Sao Paulo. It didn’t have a single screening room before the theater’s construction. The choice to invest in cinema was made by the mayor, who decided to diversify the city’s economy, previously based on industries and deemed by specialists, as the most important artistic endeavor for Brazil. To try to follow the new movie production rhythm (from 2000 to 2005, the number of films produced duplicated), more than US$ 70 million was invested. Most of the specialists see the project with optimism, some even compare to the “Vera Cruz Era”, the golden age of our industry. 

Paulinia has already important productions on its resume. Inside the already big list of movies that received resources from the pole, there is: “Topografia de Um Desnudo” (Tereza Aguiar), “E Proibido Fumar” (Anna Muylaert), “Budapeste” (Walter Carvalho) and the highly anticipated international release of Blindness (Fernando Meirelles).

Personally, having worked in Paulinia, I could watch the construction of this ambitious project. Initially the public’s main fear was that this project would get stuck in city jurisdiction. Thankfully, the culture ministry assured that the Magic of the Cinema’s responsibility is going to be passed onto public organizations and is not susceptible to be abandoned in case of an eventual change of mandate. The project’s future potential and the construction of the infrastructure has created a buzz in the media. The most impressive part of the project, in my opinion, are the social and cultural features. The school of cinema has top of line equipment and professionals fully dedicated to train the future filmmaker and film crews to feed the industry. Apart from the taxes allowances, it’s obligatory to the productions to employ a certain amount of those local professionals. In general, everything points that the project is going to be successful in a not so distant future.

Festival Recap:

The biggest winner of the night was “Encarnação do Demônio” (aka. “Devil’s Reincarnation”), from one of the most important names in the history of the Brazilian cinema, Jose Mojica Martins (view the official site here). It marks his return to the big screen after 40 years and closes the trilogy started with “At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul” (1964) and followed by “This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse” (1967). He took home the awards of best movie (fiction), best photography, best film editing, best sound editing, best soundtrack, best art direction and the critic’s choice award. Selton Mello, the protagonist of the hit “My name isn’t Johnny” and “Drained”, won the award of best director for his debut behind the cameras in “Feliz Natal”. “Simonal – Ninguém sabe o duro que dei” was chosen as the best documentary.

Brazil: International Scene

Media Convergence

The production company V2 Cinema premiered the internet short film series “Think Tank”. The short films, six in total, have as the main plot discussions — the cinematographic language and its dialog with other types of art. The first feature, “Levels”, directed by Márcio Schoenardie, is a mixture of documentary and fiction. Inside an elevator, Jose Padilha (director of “Elite Squad”) and Beto Brant (director of “The Trespasser”) talk about issues surrounding the job of director. The films are going to be released on a monthly basis. The material can be found at the website http://www.v2cinema.com/ .

New Home

Still profiting from the massive success of “Elite Squad” (this week, one of the top five of box offices of Portugal), Jose Padilha is already setting up a second project in Hollywood. According to “Variety”, after filming “A Willing patriot”, he is expected to direct the drama “Marching Powder”, produced by the actors Brad Pitt and Don Cheadle, who is also going to play the protagonist. The film is based on the novel “Marching Powder: A true story of friendship, cocaine and South America’s strangest jail” which tells the true story of the Britain drug dealer Thomas McFadden.

NYC: MoMA. Through July 28. Premiere Brazil, is a collaboration between MoMA and the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival, takes its title from a sidebar featured at the festival, where many of these films premiered. This annual series continues to introduce New York audiences to original and accomplished recent films by both new and established Brazilian filmmakers. Highlights include Marcos Jorge’s debut feature Estômago: A Gastronomic Story, veteran director Walter Lima Jr.’s Out of Tune, Jorge Furtado’s Basic Sanitation, The Movie, and Mauro Lima’s My Name Ain’t Johnny. Click here for more info.