Brazil announced today that the documentary film Babenco: Tell Me When I Die / Babenco: Alguém Tem que Ouvir o Coração e Dizer Parou by Bárbara Paz, winner of the Venice Classics Award for Best Documentary in Cinema, has been selected by the South American country as its Academy Awards contender in the Best International Feature competition.
“I have already lived my death and now all that is left is to make a film about it.” So said the Argentine-born Brazilian filmmaker Héctor Babenco (Pixote, Kiss of the Spider Woman) to his wife Paz when he realized he did not have much time left. She accepted the challenge to fulfill the last wish of her late partner: to be the main protagonist in his own death. In this tender immersion into the life of one of the greatest filmmakers from South America, Babenco himself consciously bares his soul in intimate and painful situations. He expresses fears and anxieties, and also memories, reflections, and fantasies, in this face-off between his intellectual vigor and physical frailty, which were the hallmarks of his career.
From the onset of cancer at the age of 38 until his death at 70, Babenco made of cinema his medicine and the nourishment that kept him alive. Babenco: Tell me when I Die is Paz’s debut feature film, but is also, in a way, Hector’s last work: a film about filming so never to die.
Brazil has been nominated four times for the Academy Awards, the last nomination was for Walter Salles’ Central Station in 1998, but has never won in the foreign language film category. Two of Babenco’s films had been selected as the Brazilian Oscar contenders: Pixote in 1980 (although it was disqualified as it was screened outside the Academy’s allowable dates) and Carandiru in 2003; and his 1985 American drama Kiss of the Spider Woman was nominated for four Academy Awards: for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actor—the films’s protagonist William Hurt winning in this last category.
