Cinema Tropical and Film at Lincoln Center and Cinema Tropical announce Veredas: A Generation of Brazilian Filmmakers, programmed by Mary Jane Marcasiano and Fabio Andrade, taking place December 6-11 in New York City. The range of boundary-pushing works of Brazilian film has had few parallels in recent years, with filmmakers such as Kleber Mendonça Filho, Gabriel Mascaro, Karim Aïnouz, Juliana Rojas, João Dumans, and Affonso Uchôa radically revising the world’s understanding of their national cinema.
Veredas: A Generation of Brazilian Filmmakers will showcase work from a vast and influential generation that is indelibly leaving its mark on the local and international film circuit. These often subversive films challenge boundaries of genre, form, gender, class, race, identity, and even how films are distributed. All of these changes can be attributed to the radical decentralization of Brazilian film production, which is no longer confined to the major cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
Veredas highlights this cinematic new wave and presents a vision of Brazil that is at long last reflective of the country’s continental diversity. Discussing the origin of the series title, co-programmer Marcasiano explains, “In Portuguese, veredas are small paths that crisscross many parts of Brazil: the Sertão region in Minas Gerais, the Northeast, and Goiâs. Vereda is also used to describe fertile ground. We found this word to be an apt metaphor for the current wave of Brazilian filmmaking; expressing how polyphonic Brazilian cinema has become as well as the rich creativity of its filmmakers.
“The films cover not only a vast range of genres and styles but also represent different regions and cities of the country: Recife, Belo Horizonte, São Paulo, Goiânia, João Pessoa, Rio de Janeiro, Fortaleza, Contagem, Bahia, the Amazon, and even the small city of Ceilândia.”
The series features 10 U.S. premieres, including: Karim Aïnouz’s haunting melodrama Invisible Life, which won the 2019 Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard award; the urgent Seven Years in May, Affonso Uchôa’s highly anticipated follow-up to the critically acclaimed Araby (New Directors / New Films 2017); and Júlio Bressane’s surrealist delight Bedouin, which follows a couple’s role-playing game of erotic fantasy.
Other standouts include Gabriel Mascaro’s sensual sci-fi drama Divine Love, set in a future where Brazil is a fully Evangelical nation; Adirley Queirós’s debut feature Is the City Only One?, a fiction/documentary hybrid that delves into the lives of people in Ceilândia, the impoverished satellite city of the nation’s capital, Brasília; and a free talk on the implications of current political, social, and economic development for Brazilian film with Mascaro, Gabriel Martins and Maurillo Martins (In the Heart of the World), and more to be announced.
