Brazilian director, screenwriter, and actor, Maurice Capovilla died yesterday at his home in Rio de Janeiro at the age of 85 of lung disease. He had suffered from Alzheimer's for five years. Capovilla directed eight feature films between 1968 and 2003, including The Prophet of Hunger / O Profeta da Fome (1969) starring José Mujica aka Coffin Joe, which participated in the main competition at the 20th edition of the Berlin Film Festival.
Born on January 16, 1936 in Valinhos, São Paulo, he made his film debut in the early sixties with the short film União. In 1964 he directed the documentary short film Subterrâneos do Futebol, and four years later, he made his debut feature film Bebel, Propaganda Girl / Bebel, Garota Propaganda, based on the short shorty “Bebel que a cidade comeu” by Ignacio de Loyola Brandão, about a poor and beautiful girl who is hired by a sales promoter to advertise a new brand of soap. The success is immediate, but the need for a new face hinders her way to stardom.
Capovilla played the role of a gangster in the Rogério Sganzerla’s landmark 1968 film Red Light Bandit /O Bandido da Luz Vermelha, one of the key films of Cinema Marginal, the Brazilian underground filmmaking movement of the sixties. In his 1969 film The Prophet of Hunger, Capovilla combined the aesthetics of Cinema Novo with the countercultural themes of Marginal Cinema. It marked one of Mojica's rare film performances without playing his iconic character of Coffin Joe. The film follows a decadent fakir, who, when expelled from a circus, takes the road and becomes a religious idol of a small town.
Shortly after, the two switched roles, and Capovilla acted in Mojica’s Awakening of the Beast / O Ritual dos Sádicos (1970), one of Coffin Joe’s most famous films. A year later Capovilla shot Noites de Iemanjá, in which he mixed mysticism and terror; followed by his 1977 celebrated drama O Jogo da Vida. Retired from cinema since the early eighties, Capovilla returned in 2003 with Harmada" an adaptation of João Gilberto Noll's novel with touches of surrealism and metalanguage. His last feature film was the 2016 film Nervos de Aço,
