Brazilian prominent filmmaker Geraldo Sarno died on Tuesday at the age of 83 of complications derived from COVID-19, he had been hospitalized for a month. He was best known for his cinematic depictions of the sertão, the country’s northeastern backlands, which became a staple of Brazilian national cinema through the work of numerous filmmakers.
Sarno was born on March 6, 1938 in Poções, Bahia, in an Italian immigrant family. He studied law in Salvador, and traveled to Cuba in 1962, where he lived over a year studying cinema. In 1965, he premiered his landmark documentary featurette Viramundo, which showed the saga of the northeastern migrants arriving to São Paulo, and became the first of several works exploring the culture of the region, as well as the economic and political adversities of its people and its migrants with a lyrical lens.
He worked closely with the Farkas Caravan, a project by Brazilian-Hungarian documentarian and photographer Thomaz Farkas, with close ties to the Cinema Novo movement, with the aim of producing the series of direct cinema titled “Cinema Truth. During the following decade, Sarno directed numerous documentary shorts expanding on his own examination of the sertão, including Vitalino/Lampião (1969), O Engenho (1970) and Padre Cícero (1971). His documentary short Viva Caririm, about the attempt to industrialize part of the backlands, was screened as part of the 1971 edition of Directors’ Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival.
In 1973, Sarno premiered his debut fiction feature O Pica-pau Amarelo, a fantasy movie based on the book by Monteiro Lobato about characters from children's fables, and in 1978, Sarno returned to Cannes with his feature film Colonel Delmira Gouveia. Starring Rubens de Falco, Sura Berditchevsky, Nildo Parente, Joffre Soares, and José Dumont, the period film premiered in the Un Certain Regard competition and tells the story and exploits of Colonel Delmiro Gouveia, one of the earliest industrial entrepreneurs of Brazil, founder of the Corrente factories. The film was the winner of the Best Film Award at the first edition of the Havana Film Festival in 1979.
Other titles include the documentary films Eu Carrego um Sertão Dentro de Mim (1980), A Terra Queima (1984), Deus é um Fogo (1992), and O Último Romance de Balzac. In 1996, he became director of the magazine Cinemais and launches a documentary series on film language interviewing numerous Brazilian directors including Walter Salles, Júlio Bressane, Carlos Reichenbach, Ana Carolina and Ruy Guerra. His last production was the 2018 black-and-white historical feature Sertânia.
