September 6 - 15, 2024
Film at Lincoln Center

“Isso é Brasil: Cinema According to L.C. Barreto Productions,” is a 13-film retrospective commemorating 60 years of L.C. Barreto Film Productions, one of Brazil's most important production companies, helmed by the renowned family of filmmakers. From September 6 through September 15, the series will celebrate the Barretos’s incomparable influence with a selection of canonical classics and under-seen gems, most of which will premiere in new 4K restorations. Lucy Barreto, Paula Barreto, and Bruno Barreto—director of four films in this series—will be in person at FLC to introduce select screenings and take part in Q&As.

When it comes to Brazilian cinema, “there is before the Barretos and after,” said the actress Sonia Braga, whose breakthrough came in the international hit Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1976), directed by Bruno Barreto and produced by his parents’ L.C. Barreto Film Productions. Since its founding in 1963 by Luiz Carlos and Lucy Barreto (who are still active in the company), the Rio de Janeiro–based enterprise—which has, in various capacities, involved their children Bruno, Fábio, and Paula—transformed into one of Brazil’s most important film production companies that has championed radically political and experimental works, festival prizewinners, and unabashed crowd-pleasers alike. 

All screenings at:
Film at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St., New York City

Admission: General admission is $17; students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities discount of $14; and $12 for FLC Members. See more and save with a 3+ Film Package ($15 for GP; $12 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $10 for FLC Members).

www.filmlinc.org/series/isso-e-brasil-cinema-according-to-l-c-barreto-productions

Organized by Tyler Wilson of Film at Lincoln Center and Mary Jane Marcasiano of Cinema Tropical, presented in collaboration with Instituto Guimarães Rosa/Consulate General of Brazil in New York.

BARREN LIVES / VIDAS SÊCAS
A film by Nelson Pereira dos Santos
(Brazil, 1963, 100 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
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Along with Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil and Ruy Guerra’s The Guns, Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s impassioned adaptation of the novel by Graciliano Ramos is considered part of the Golden Trilogy of films that announced Cinema Novo to the world. Set in 1940 amidst a drought-stricken sertão of northeastern Brazil, Barren Lives follows a family—Sinhá Vitória (Maria Ribeiro), Fabiano (Átila Iório), their two small boys, and their dog—as they traverse the region’s merciless landscape in search of work, their attempts to eke out any living met only with further hostility and violence by authority figures. Producer Luiz Carlos Barreto, who also served as a cinematographer, used a “naked lens, with no filter,” that embraced blown-out contrasts and transformed austere imagery into something altogether more unusual and immediate, amounting to a flinty portrait of cyclical poverty that, as the film’s opening implores, “no worthy Brazilian can ignore anymore.” 4K Restoration · Introduction by Lucy Barreto and Bruno Barreto on September 7

Saturday, September 7 at 3:15pm; Friday, September 13 at 6:30pm

GARRINCHA, THE PEOPLE’S JOY / GARRINCHA, ALEGRIA DO POVO
A film by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade
(Brazil, 1963, 61 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
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“I can only make films in Brazil and about Brazil. Only Brazil interests me,” once declared Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, whose five features and nine shorts form one of the most important oeuvres of Cinema Novo. His debut feature—arguably one of the greatest films about soccer—is a form-shifting documentary portrait of his country’s beloved bow-legged dribbler Mané Garrincha. Interspersing moving images and still photographs (many taken by Luiz Carlos Barreto, who also produced and co-wrote the film), de Andrade weaves a kaleidoscopic sketch of the unlikely athlete. In three sections, the film imparts a direct-cinema look at Garrincha’s daily life and his celebrity; a dramatic, near play-by-play account of his performances (and upstaging by the much younger Pelé) in Brazil’s 1958 and ’62 World Cup wins; and, finally, a coda suggesting the icon’s mythic hold on his spectators’ imagination as something by turns galvanizing and paralytic. 2K restoration courtesy of L.C. Barreto Produções Cinematográficas.

Sunday, September 8 at 3pm; Saturday, September 14 at 4:30pm

THE HOUR AND TURN OF AUGUSTO MATRAGA / A HORA E VEZ DE AUGUSTO MATRAGA
A film by Roberto Santos
(Brazil, 1965, 109 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
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Luiz Carlos Barreto, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and singer/composer Geraldo Vandré produced this exhilarating western based on João Guimarães Rosa’s Sagarana, a haunting short story collection detailing people of the sertão in the Brazil’s southeastern state of Minas Gerais. It follows the mythical “hero’s journey” of Augusto Matraga (Leonardo Villar), a violent farmer betrayed by his wife and left for dead. After he is rescued by a pair of farmers, Matraga transforms into a man of faith, and his path of contrition is tested when an opportunity for revenge careens toward an unforgettable final act. Featuring an intense score by Vandré (which Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles revived in Bacurau [2019]), The Hour and Turn of Augusto Matraga wisely upends Old versus New Testament lessons and transforms its deceptively simple revenge story into something far more ruminative and vast. Featuring Jofre Soares and Maria Ribeiro, who previously appeared in Barren Lives. North American Premiere of 4K Restoration · Introduction by Lucy Barreto and Bruno Barreto on September 7

Saturday, September 7 at 8:45pm; Thursday, September 12 at 4pm; Friday, September 15 at 6pm

ENTRANCED EARTH / TERRA EM TRANCE
A film by Glauber Rocha
(Brazil, 1967, 108 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
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A pivotal film from one of the key figures of Brazil’s Cinema Novo, Entranced Earth is alternately a rallying cry and a poetic account of political corruption, the systems that shape it, and the challenges of active citizenship in times of political upheaval. Made three years after the right-wing coup d’etat in Brazil, the film is set in the fictional country of El Dorado, in which a young intellectual attempts to chart a political path. First joining the extreme right, and then a party of the left, he ultimately finds dispiriting power dynamics in each. Shot by Luiz Carlos Barreto and unfolding in a mesmeric style that mixes bizarre, baroque imagery with realist formal maneuvers—something like the synthesis of Rosi, Buñuel, and Visconti—the film is a monumental work of political cinema that pushes its audience to examine its own role in civil society.

Friday, September 6 at 9pm; Wednesday, September 11 at 6pm; Saturday, September 14 at 6:30pm

THIS IS PELÉ / ISTO É PELÉ
A film by Luiz Carlos Barreto and Eduardo Escorel
(Brazil, 1974, 70min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
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Released four years after the Brazilian national team’s 1970 World Cup victory, Luiz Carlos Barreto’s directorial debut—made with Cinema Novo editor Eduardo Escorel (Entranced Earth, Macunaíma, among many others)—assembles excerpts from seemingly hundreds of hours of footage taken of the record-breaking footballer. On the soundtrack, journalist Sérgio Chapelin tells the story of the Brazilian team’s first three World Cup wins with Pelé as the protagonist. Unlike in Garrincha, the People’s Joy, which studied the inner and public life of its subject, This Is Pelé delights solely in the athlete’s artistry on the field. Escorel’s montage, composed of both black-and-white and gorgeous color archival material, alights upon small but specific details of its extraordinary subject: his passes, his goals, and the cultish crowds cheering around him. 2K restoration courtesy of L.C. Barreto Produções Cinematográficas.

Tuesday, September 10 at 5:15pm; Sunday, September 15 at 8:30pm

DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS / DONA FLOR E SEUS DOIS MARIDOS
A film by Bruno Barreto
(Brazil, 1976, 117 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
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“O Que Será!” Bruno Barreto was 20 years old when he injected new life into Brazilian cinema and announced Sônia Braga to the world with this sensuous comedy-fantasy, based on the brilliant Jorge Amado’s 1966 novel. Braga stars as Flor, whose gambling, unfaithful husband Vadinho (José Wilker, Bye Bye Brazil) drops dead while dancing in the streets of Bahia during carnival. Eight years later, Flor gets the respectable husband she’s always yearned for in Dr. Teodoro Maduereira (Mauro Mendonça), but her neglected libido calls her first husband from the grave…. With the help of Murilo Salles’s brilliant camerawork, set against Salvador’s colonial colors, Dona Flor brilliantly contrasts Bahia’s rigid middle-class customs with the libertine life richly embodied by Wilker’s blond malandrinho and Braga’s erotic breakthrough performance. Considering the words of Amado, a communist militant who left Brazil from 1941–42, and music by Chico Buarque, who left during the ’60s military dictatorship, the film, while not overtly political, features themes of love, loss, and exile. Dona Flor became one of Brazil's most successful films upon its release in 1976, and remained its highest grossing for 35 years. Internationally, it received Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations and was the highest-grossing Brazilian film in the U.S. for more than 20 years. 4K restoration · Q&A with Lucy Barreto and Bruno Barreto moderated by Mila Burns on September 6

Friday, September 6 at 6pm; Tuesday, September 10 at 2:45pm; September 14 at 9pm

AMOR BANDIDO
A film by Bruno Barreto
(Brazil, 1979, 90 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
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Bruno Barreto’s follow-up to Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands is a love story of an entirely different order—a mixture of sexploitation sleaze and hard-boiled melodrama that calls to mind Hardcore and Natural Born Killers. Set within the tropical, overcrowded quarters of Rio’s Copacabana, where newsstands peddle porn in comic books and a serial killer preys upon cab drivers, go-go girl/sex worker Sandra (Christina Aché) and her sadistic hustler boyfriend Toninho (Paolo Guarnieri) play out a doomed romance against the backdrop of this wanton killing spree, which happens to be investigated by Sandra's estranged cop father (Paulo Gracindo). Written by José Louzeiro and Leopoldo Serran, who allegedly based their screenplay on true events, Amor Bandido is a vividly unsettling and completely bizarre tale about a stratified patriarchal society and the uncontrollable fallout of its disenfranchised youth. World Premiere of 4K Restoration · Introduction by Lucy Barreto and Bruno Barreto on September 8

Sunday, September 8 at 8pm; Wednesday, September 11 at 8:30pm

BYE BYE, BRAZIL / BY BYE, BRASIL
A film by Carlos Diegues
(Brazil/Argentina/France, 1980, 103 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
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Cinema Novo godfather Carlos Diegues directed films that were an integral part of the cultural and sociopolitical struggles facing Brazil in the 1960s, particularly the country’s underexplored Afro-Brazilian heritage. One of his most essential works, Bye Bye Brazil concerns a motley crew of traveling performers (led by José Wilker, the devilish spirit of Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands) entertaining various audiences across Brazil’s northwestern Amazonian landscape. Accordionist Ciço (Fábio Júnior) and his wife Dasdô (Zaira Zambelli) join the rollicking caravan, leading to a string of adventures and good songs. Diegues’s low-key road movie-cum-musical captures the country’s changing times—both the myth and the reality of Brazil’s underdevelopment—with documentary-like specificity. North American Premiere of 4K Restoration · Q&A with Lucy Barreto and Bruno Barreto moderated by Tyler Wilson on September 7

Saturday, September 7 at 6pm; Wednesday, September 11 at 3:45pm; Friday, September 13 at 9pm

MEMOIRS OF PRISON / MEMÓRIAS DO CÁRCERE
A film by Nelson Pereira dos Santos
(Brazil, 1984, 188 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
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This major late-career work from Nelson Pereira dos Santos (who had struggled to make it for more than 20 years) is based, as was his earlier groundbreaking film Barren Lives, on a book by Graciliano Ramos. Though it takes place during the Getúlio Vargas dictatorships of the 1930s, when a violent wave of repressions swept the country, Pereira doubtlessly points to a more contemporary Brazil, crafting a damning account against prisons in the widest sense of the term. It centers on Ramos (Carlos Vereza) sinking ever deeper into a bizarre nightmare after he is locked up with other political prisoners in Rio de Janeiro (for “subversive” writing) and then, eventually, with all stripes of inmates on a remote island. Through enforced contact with a wide variety of criminals, he gains a more refined understanding of his country as he grows closer than ever to his wife (Glória Pires), who is transformed by her husband’s imprisonment into a resourceful and enterprising combatant in the struggle for freedom. Winner of the International Critics Prize for the best film at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival. 4K restoration courtesy of L.C. Barreto Produções Cinematográficas.

Tuesday, September 10 at 7pm; Sunday, September 15 at 2pm

O QUATRILHO
A film by Fábio Barreto
(Brazil, 1995 Brazil, 114 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
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The first Brazilian film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in more than 30 years, Fábio Barreto’s romantic historical melodrama is a complex study of love and ambition at the dawn of the 20th century. Set in Brazil’s southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul around 1910, when thousands of Italian immigrants were settling in the area, the film concerns two such couples—Teresa and Angelo, and Pierina and Massimo—whose respectively mismatched unions become painfully apparent when they decide to live under one roof. Their four lives intersect with lasting repercussions after Massimo (Bruno Campos, in his film debut) and Teresa (Patricia Pillar) develop undeniable feelings for each other. Drawn from José Clemente Pozenato’s novel of the same name, which refers to a card game in which partners must betray each other to win, O Quatrilho luxuriates in agrarian period trappings while casting a jaundiced eye on restrictive cultural mores. 2K restoration courtesy of L.C. Barreto Produções Cinematográficas.

Monday, September 9 at 9pm; Saturday, September 14 at 2pm

FOUR DAYS IN SEPTEMBER / O QUE É ISSO, COMPANHEIRO?
A film by Bruno Barreto
(Brazil, 1997, 113 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
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Four years after the United States-backed coup d’etat in Brazil, freedom of speech was suspended and dissident intellectuals were rounded up for torture, death, and deportation. Bruno Barreto’s Oscar-nominated political thriller chronicles one of the most radical acts born of this period, in which a group of young revolutionaries abducted the United States Ambassador to Brazil, Charles Elbrick, and held him in the hilly neighborhood of Santa Teresa until the military government agreed to release 15 imprisoned rebels. Starring Alan Arkin as Elbrick and Pedro Cardoso as Fernando Gabeira, whose 1979 account in O Que É Isso, Companheiro? formed the basis for this film, Four Days in September is an ultra-tense process movie and a complex, melancholic meditation on the everyday Brazilians who challenged and were ultimately destroyed by the dictatorship. World Premiere of 4K Restoration · Q&A with Lucy Barreto and Bruno Barreto moderated by Larry Rohter on September 8

Sunday, September 8 at 5pm; Thursday, September 12 at 8:30pm

THE MIDDLE OF THE WORLD / O CAMINHO DAS NUVENS
A film by Vicente Amorim
(Brazil, 2003, 85 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
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Vicente Amorim’s fourth feature is an emotional drama in the genre of Brazilian road movies and sertão films. Set before Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s first election, it is based on the true story of a truck driver, Cícero Ferreira Dias, whose family bikes from Paraíba state to Rio de Janeiro in search of a job paying 1,000 Brazilian reais, a highly unrealistic salary for an unskilled man. Wagner Moura (Elite Squad, Narcos), in one of his breakthrough roles, and Cláudia Abreu star as Romão and Rose, a couple with five children making the 3,200-kilometer (2,000-mile) family bicycle trip, earning some money along the way singing the hits of Roberto Carlos at road stops. David França Mendes’s sensitive script makes it subtly clear that, for a poor man, this is a utopian value—a fantasy that gives Romão comfort and hope. A New Directors/New Films 2004 selection. Preserved 35mm print courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive.

Monday, September 9 at 4pm; Thursday, September 12 at 6:15pm

REACHING FOR THE MOON / FLORES RARAS
A film by Bruno Barreto
(Brazil, 2013, 115 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
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Adding to his oeuvre of films set in Rio, Bruno Barreto’s 1950s–60s romantic drama follows American poet Elizabeth Bishop and her affair with architect Lota de Macedo Soares, designer of Rio’s Flamengo Park. Miranda Otto (Lord of the Rings) portrays Bishop as icy yet vulnerable, while Glória Pires embodies the passionate Lota. The film juxtaposes Bishop’s alcoholism with Lota’s park obsession against the backdrop of Brazil’s brewing military coup. As their relationship unravels and Bishop returns to New York, the film offers a unique perspective on this turbulent period in Brazil’s history. It explores the quest for inspiration and is a cautionary tale on relationship dynamics. Marcelo Zarvos’s lush score features iconic Brazilian songs by Humberto Teixeira, Antônio Carlos Jobim, and Vinicius de Moraes, along with classics by Irving Berlin and Billie Holiday. World Premiere of 4K Restoration · Q&A with Bruno Barreto moderated by Mary Jane Marcasiano on September 9

Monday, September 9 at 6pm; Friday, September 13 at 4pm