The Tropical Trail

I enjoy putting together programs of Brazilian films and sharing them with cinema audiences around the world. Each invitation for a “carte blanche” requires some specific ideas, like thinking you know who the audience is (no one can ever be sure) and picturing the venue where the films will be screened. You also hope for good chemistry within a group of films which are essentially all very different with your assigned audience.

For the Sydney Film Festival – which I have come to know quite well over the years as a filmmaker – I thought this might be an exciting opportunity to curate a list of Brazilian films I love and which might establish a strong connection with the Australian audience. I wonder how these films will play in that wonderful screening room at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where I saw The Heartbreak Kid last year!

The films in this program are both steeped in history and in contemporary images, short films and features. Brazil is a huge country, its diverse cultures, its beauty and the irony of its inequality, its violence. Above all, my country’s capacity to express love and affection, our spectacular panorama of human faces, these are all ideas I bear in mind.

Some of the films might be seen as crowd pleasers and classics, others might leave you shocked and dismayed. They might move you to tears. One film, Man Marked for Death, Twenty Years Later (Cabra Marcado Para Morrer, 1984), by Eduardo Coutinho, is the title I always show, no matter where. Programs may vary, but that one film will always be there. I really think every time it screens, something happens, someone in the audience makes a great discovery. And when that happens, a little more is revealed about the truth of Brazil and the world.

I would like to thank Festival Director Nashen Moodley for the invitation and to all the programming team who made it happen.

Obrigado.

– Kleber Mendonça Filho, Curator