Prolific Brazilian filmmaker Luiz Rosemberg Filho, one of the key figures of Cinema Marginal who remained active in a career spanning over five decades, has died at the age of 75 due to complications derived from a surgery.
Born in 1943 in Rio de Janeiro, Rosemberg Filho debuted in 1968 with the film Balada de Página Três, with a screenplay by Ruy Guerra. Along with Rogério Sganzerla (The Red Light Bandit), Júlio Bressane (Killed the Family and Went to the Movies), and Andrea Tonacci (Bang Bang), he became one of the most prominent directors of the so-called Marginal Cinema of the seventies. A heterogenous radical cinema movement that criticized the European arthouse aesthetics of Brazil’s Cinema Novo and pushed the envelop in terms of narratives and politics during Brazil’s dictatorship.
Some of Rosemberg Filho’s most renowned titles are Jardim de Espumas (1971), A$$untina das Amérikas (1976), Crônica de um Industrial (1978), which participated in the Directors’ Fortnight section at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, and O Santo e a Vedete (1982). More recently, he directed the feature film Guerra do Paraguay / Paraguay War in 2016, about a soldier coming home after the Paraguay War meets a theater group.
Rosemberg Filho directed 11 feature films and 34 short films, and was also a visual artist and writer. He had premiered the feature film Os Príncipes last year, and was working on a new project titled O bobo da corte / The Jester.
