Brazilian director and screenwriter Suzana Amaral died yesterday at the age of 88 in São Paulo of pulmonary complications. With a small yet powerful filmography of three feature films, she was best known for her 1985 debut feature Hour of the Star / A Hora da Estrela based on the novel of the same name by Clarice Lispector, and which participated in the official competition at the Berlin Film Festival.
Born March 28, 1932 in São Paulo, she studied filmmaking at the University of São Paulo and, after graduating, combined teaching with a job at Radio and Television Cultura, where she produced over fifty documentaries. Her debut short film was His Majesty Piolim / Sua Majestade Piolim, about the famous clown and his connections with popular theater, followed by Semana de 22, an overview of São Paulo’s foundational 1922 Modern Art Week. In 1976, Amaral moved to New York to studied film at New York University, graduating in 1978.
Amaral's assured first feature film, Hour of the Star, was the winner of the Silver Bear for Best Actress for her protagonist Marcélia Cartaxo, and was also Brazil’s candidate to the Academy Awards. The film is a character study of Macabea, an unattractive, naive, and impoverished young woman from the countryside who arrives in the city to find work. Taking up a position as a typist in a grimy warehouse and rooming with a group of streetwise women, Macabea is ill-equipped to cope with big city life. Nevertheless, a romance with a young man stirs her.
The other two films she directed were the 2001 drama A Hidden Life / Uma Vida em Segredo, and the 2009 road movie Hotel Atlântico. Winner of the Best Film Award at the Huelva Film Festival and based on the novel by Autran Dourado, A Hidden Life follows a young girl who was born and raised on an isolated farm and is brought to a small town to live with her cousins, her only relatives. Once in town, she encounters great difficulty adapting to the more urban lifestyle.
Based on the novel by João Gilberto Noll and winner of the Best Film at Lima’s Latin American Film Festival, Hotel Atlântico tells the story of a solitary man as he sets off on a journey to the south of Brazil. The strange characters and absurd situations he encounters along the way present an extraordinary portrait of human relations.
