By Pilar Dirickson Garrett
Cine Limite, a new website and streaming platform dedicated to disseminating and producing critical work on Brazilian cinema, launched this past Monday to global audiences. Conceived at the beginning of the summer with the notion of creating an English-friendly hub for Brazilian cinema, Cine Limite seeks to promote and facilitate transnational conversations between cultural producers in Brazil and English-speaking cinephiles in the US, while also offering a central platform from which to legally stream works of historical importance in Brazil’s annals of cinema, always with English subtitles.
A New York City and Bahia-based non-profit media arts organization, Limite imagines itself as an online platform for newly translated classics and works of contemporary Brazilian cinema while providing engaging supplementary materials in the form of text and moving image essays, interviews, resource lists, and more.
Limite’s programing kicks off with “Black Constellations: Zózimo Bulbul and the New Wave of Black Brazilian Cinema,” featuring free, month-long access to Bulbul’s Abolição (1988), supported by three new essays on the film from Janaína Oliveira, Marcell Carrasco, and Bernardo Oliveira; a video essay on Compasso de Espera (1969) by Juliano Gomes and Mariana Nunes; and a panoramic view of Black filmmakers and short films by Heitor Augusto.
Alongside this inaugural installment also comes "Archives in Crisis: Insights into Brazilian Cultural Preservation,” offering audiences free, month-long access to Carlos Adriano's A Voz e o Vazio - A Vez de Vassourinha (1998) plus an interview with the filmmaker on the making of the film, an interview with the director of the Cinemateca do MAM Hernani Heffner on film preservation in Brazil today, and an interview with the Trabalhadores of the Cinemateca Brasileira movement on their most recent workers strike.
These pieces are further bolstered by supplementary publications from a group of film preservationists and archivists that have worked closely with the Cinemateca Brasileira over the past two decades, offering insights into those works of Brazilian cinema that require immediate preservation attention in the wake of the funding crisis currently befalling the indispensable Brazilian institution.
Both of these compelling programs are now available worldwide on cinelimite.com.
Check out the site’s new trailer here:
