João Luiz Vieira and B. Ruby Rich

From Film Quarterly, Winter 2020, Volume 74, Number 2

On June 4, 2020, as soon as the lockdown permitted, the São Paulo Filmmakers Association (APACI, Associação Paulista de Cineastas) led a protest outside the Cinemateca Brasileira, one of the great archives of the entire world and most certainly of Latin America, to protest the government’s bankrupting and shuttering of this key cultural resource and its precious, once-climate-controlled home in São Paulo. By then, its staff had been unpaid for four months, then dismissed, all sixty-two of them; its systems were in danger of complete collapse, its governance in dispute, archives in danger, and future threatened.¹

While the Cinemateca was already in dire straits from underfunding and interference, Jair Bolsonaro’s election had escalated the danger—to the Cinemateca; to the Brazilian Film Agency (ANCINE, Agência Nacional do Cinema), the federal film-funding body, founded in 2001; and to Brazilian film in general—as Bolsonaro made clear when, on only his second day in office, he dismantled the Ministry of Culture.² Bolsonaro’s government moved swiftly against Brazilian film in particular with increasing attacks and dismantlings, even in the midst of the pandemic.³ Bolsonaro was intent on erasing memory: nothing could exist before him. Any other country would claim as its own all the films and prizes that Brazilian cinema was then being awarded, but instead, its success evidently made him hate it all the more.

To set the stage for this moment, consider Brazil’s recent history. The origin moment for this history was the election of Lula (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) in 2002 to the presidency. The popular and populist (in the old sense) leader remained in office for two terms, until the election of his hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff, in 2010. Her election cemented the continuation of the national project of the Workers Party (PT, Partido dos Trabalhadores), including its redistribution of resources and support for a racially and economically inclusive cultural sector. Their governments realized the hope of many to create a truly diverse Brazil with resources and dreams for all—and its project worked for a long time and is not incidental to this dossier.

Dilma, too, was reelected to a second term (in 2014), but throughout this period she was beset by a series of legal, extralegal, and illegal maneuvers by the country’s right-wing opposition that were designed to force her out of office. Meanwhile, Lula was jailed on dubious charges to prevent his running again, and Dilma’s duplicitous vice president, Michel Temer, was elevated to the presidency in 2016, serving until the fall 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro, who campaigned openly on nostalgia for the days of Brazil’s military coup and the fascist regime it ushered in.

But wait. Rewind, please. The thirteen years and eight months of the Workers Party government are crucial to the current state of Brazilian cinema. What did Lula do, upon being elected? He appointed Gilberto Gil, beloved musician and celebrated antifascist, as his minister of culture, and began efforts to reform Brazil’s social and economic inequalities. Brazil has long had one of the most unequal levels of income distribution between rich and poor of any country, in terms of education as well as culture; the Lula/Gil goal was to transform the country so that it would truly represent its diverse population, and to put an end to localized concentrations of resources. Dilma continued and even expanded that effort, despite increasingly damaging opposition from the right, until she was forced from office.

These initiatives of the Lula/Dilma years emphasized a disbursement of resources throughout Brazil; in cinema, they began to end the centralization of production in Rio and São Paulo in favor of a geographical decentralization that created vital new film cultures in areas that had lacked local filmmaking centers and vocabularies. The result of this decade-plus effort was, then, a flowering of Brazil’s cinematic production at the level of both numbers and imaginations. It emerged from the creation of the Fundo Setorial do Audiovisual (FSA), a milestone in public policy implemented under Lula’s government to promote the film and audiovisual industry in the country, innovative in terms of both state stimulus and the scope of its application: activities associated with different segments of the sector’s economic chain, including production, distribution, marketing, exhibition, and service infrastructure, coordinated with investments and financing operations.⁴

From 2007 to late 2018, FSA programs had built up strong new locally embedded and conversant film cultures reflecting worlds and imaginaries rarely seen in the history of Brazilian cinema.⁵ The FSA worked very well to support independent productions throughout the country. But when Bolsonaro closed the Ministry of Culture (as former president Fernando Collor de Melo had done in 1990 with the agency Embrafilme), he abruptly froze its funds and refused to disburse them as intended, provoking widespread unemployment throughout the film sector as well as freezing film production. This moment in January 2019 marks the official start of bolsonarismo, the campaign to extinguish the vitality of the entire public sector of Brazil, in keeping with Bolsonaro’s long-held hatred of its achievements.

There has been a tendency in the United States, especially with mainstream critics, to chart Brazilian film post–Cinema Novo in terms of individual films and auteurist filmmakers—from Bruno Barreto to Suzana Amaral, Walter Salles to Fernando Meirelles—rather than in terms of any movement or unified aesthetics, or of connecting the dots to link cultural practice to political context. In film studies, however, scholars such as Robert Stam, Randal Johnson, Lúcia Nagib, Lisa Shaw, Stephanie Dennison, and others have tried to chart the links between cinematic practices and a broader political context.

In Brazil, meanwhile, a period of recuperation—the retomada—had followed the impeachment of Collor de Melo in 1992 and has been recognized as a resurgence of the strength of Brazilian film.⁶ It is in this period of 1992 to 2003 that feature films such as Carlota Joaquina (Carla Camurati, 1995), Um céu de estrelas (A Starry Sky, Tata Amaral, 1995), Central do Brasil (Central Station, Walter Salles, 1998), Cidade de Deus (City of God, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002), Onibus 174 (Bus 174, José Padilha, 2002), Madame Satã, (Karim Aïnouz, 2002) Carandiru (Hector Babenco, 2003), and others attracted national and global attention and began to restore the reputation of Brazilian cinema. Throughout this resurgence, though, the hegemony of the Rio–São Paulo axis continued.

After 2002, the identity of Brazilian cinema changed forever as the policies of the Workers Party and the Lula/Dilma governments began to deliver the promised distribution of resources in the service of a diverse, truly representative cinema—an intensive period that undergirds this dossier. Its role was not a matter of mere funding to individuals; rather, policies of financing met popular needs through the cultivation of a new generation, new concepts, and the formation of new young film cooperatives—in the far-flung regions of Brazil: Ceará, Pernambuco, Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul, and so many more. The works that began to emerge from these initiatives from collectives and cooperatives—including Filmes do Caixote, Alumbramento, the Guarani Film Collective, Teia, Filmes de Plástico, Coletivo de Imagens, Ceicine, Filmes de Quintal, CUAL (Coletivo Urgente do Audiovisual), Mate com Angu, Filmes a Granel, Caboré, Surto e Deslumbramento, and a range of other Indigenous film groups—are distinct in style and fiercely dedicated to local expression.

In addition, the new cinema was invigorated by the innovations of a new Brazilian black cinema entirely defined by its own cultures and communities, extending themes and locations beyond colonialist boundaries; similarly, there was an emergence of Indigenous filmmaking finally freed of anthropological frameworks.

What is fascinating about this period is that film creation departed completely from the older models of individual careers to bring into being a community structure capable of delivering new collective visions in line with the new Brazil being created. New film collectives began to spring up throughout the country; earlier, one of the only models was the longstanding Video in the Villages (Vídeo na Aldeias), which predated all such initiatives when it was founded in 1986. Instead, the independent collectives attracted a new generation of filmmakers intent on collaborating to design their own filmic language reflective of their realities, the streets of their cities, their common lives, the quotidian, as well as the fights in their forests and the on-the-ground struggles that fed new genres and approaches.

Two key issues deserve to be mentioned here: the launching of editais (public solicitations) for low-budget (BO, baixo orçamento) films and the arrival of cheaper production costs through the use of digital technology. These factors facilitated regional and racial diversity and the growth in the number of filmmakers making their debut in the feature-film format, after a successful phase of making short films. Importantly, the public funds were available to these new production groups as well as the traditional producers, allowing them all to access government funds to make their projects manifest.

Notably, the new film culture was fortified by the establishment of multiple film festivals throughout the country, providing both an outlet for the new production and a meeting place for the emergent filmmakers. This explosion of film festivals all over Brazil has created wide public access and an engaged audience welcoming the new films in which they could see themselves represented, for the first time, on-screen. For many of the filmmakers in this dossier and many of the writers as well, these film festivals have been crucial spaces for elaborating a vital new cinematic universe. The symbiosis between the screens, publics, and creators cannot be underestimated: it is the true foundation of the Novíssimo Cinema Brasileiro, as these films collectively have been called, and of the creativity, brilliance, and visions that inspired this dossier.

The new cinema has created a rich new criticism, too, which fortifies this dossier.⁷ Its writers and many of the filmmakers have expanded and updated the concept of the quilombo (once the name for a community of escaped slaves) to name a broader aesthetic movement that unites filmmakers, whose ranks finally include a significant presence of women, into a new black cinema with distinctive styles, goals, and collaborative energies.

Throughout this period, Brazilian cinema continued to establish an international presence and win recognition in film festivals, culminating in the period 2018–19 with a record number of films produced and released. At the Berlin Film Festival of 2020 alone, there were nineteen new Brazilian films presented throughout its sections—an entirely unprecedented presence. In 2018–19 alone, ANCINE reported a total of 350 features (183 in 2018 and 167 in 2019) released theatrically, almost all of them produced as a result of the financial support from the government’s special tax incentives. Some of these films include Karim Aïnouz’s A vida invisível de Eurídice Gusmão (The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão, 2019); Maya Da-Rin’s A febre (The Fever, 2019); Helvécio Marins Jr.’s Querência (2018); Caru Alves de Souza’s Meu nome é Bagdá (My Name Is Baghdad, 2020); Petra Costa’s Democracia em vertigem (On the Edge of Democracy, 2019); Júlia Murat’s Pendular (2017); Renata Pinheiro’s Açúcar (Sugar, 2019, with Sergio Oliveira); Sandra Kogut’s Três verões (Three Summers, 2019).

The creative energy and signal accomplishments have not gone unnoticed at Film Quarterly. A dossier on the work of Eduardo Coutinho coedited by Natalia Brizuela and B. Ruby Rich was published back in 2016.⁸ More recently, two articles directly addressing Brazil’s political convulsions have been published in FQ. One appeared on the cover of the spring 2020 issue (vol. 73, no. 3). “Due Process,” Nilo Couret’s interview with Maria Augusta Ramos on the occasion of her documentary O processo (The Trial, 2018), chronicled the “parliamentary coup” against Dilma Rousseff, delving into the impeachment process and her trial in the senate. The other, in the spring 2019 issue (vol. 72, no. 3), was a manifesto by Karim Aïnouz, commissioned for a collection addressing global crises and written in collaboration with Viviane Letayf, “Hutukara (‘The Part of the Sky from Which the Earth Was Born,’ in Yanomami).”⁹ Three new Brazilian films were also discussed in B. Ruby Rich’s 2019 festival reports: The Edge of Democracy, The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmāo, and Três verões.¹⁰

When this dossier was first in preparation in the fall of 2019, both George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were still alive and the pandemic had not yet arrived. But the endemic racism and police aggression now being protested in the United States and across the globe were already pervasive and well known also in Brazil. The Novíssimo Cinema Novo movement in Brazil, privileging the visions of those communities so long shut out of filmic representation and creation, cannot be separated from these events.

Even the mainstream success of Bacurau has a link to the new geography: Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles are based in Recife, Pernambuco, not in Rio or São Paulo. Ever since the critical and popular success of the retomada hit Baile perfumado (Perfumed Ball, 1997), by Lírio Ferreira and Paulo Caldas, their home state of Pernambuco has become the third audiovisual center in the country, immediately behind Rio and São Paulo in cinematic importance, prefiguring the further diversification of production in the succeeding years.¹¹

In the era of bolsonarismo, however, no such advances can be assumed to prevail. Despite Brazil’s recent history of geographic, racial, and gender diversification, disgracefully, the commission for a new well-financed film on the life of Marielle Franco, charismatic Black lesbian politician and champion of the favelas, who was assassinated in 2018 at the age of thirty-eight, has been granted to Bolsonaro sympathizer José Padilha, the action-movie director of Tropa de elite (Elite Squad, 2007) and its sequel.¹² It would have been far more appropriate, and far more exciting, to see a film on Franco’s life and work made by any one of the brilliant Black filmmakers discussed in this dossier.

In these pages, Film Quarterly is proud to introduce a new generation of Brazilian filmmakers and scholars (and some veterans, there and here—these editors included) who have changed the landscape of Brazilian cinema. They provide a model of the importance of crediting new voices and bodies—Black and provincial and Indigenous, female, male, and nonbinary—to create important and distinctive visions.

This dossier was originally suggested by FQ editorial board member João Luiz Vieira and hatched within the Editorial Board of Film Quarterly in the wake of seismic political shifts in Brazil, ongoing throughout 2019–20.¹³ The gravitational pull of these films and writings was demanding sustained attention. Vieira had been suggesting for some time that FQ organize a focus on Brazilian cinema, emphasizing the unprecedented excitement of its development and the prizes that the new films were winning at festivals around the world (and at home). The result is the dossier presented here: a look at the contemporary Brazilian cinema that has emerged outside film’s traditional habitats, planting itself instead in the periphery, offshoots of a cultural policy by the governments of Lula and Dilma, the product of seeds now endangered by the scorched-earth policies of Bolsonaro. Hopefully this dossier can attract greater attention, distribution, exhibition, and publication in the United States for these filmmakers and scholars.

Karla Holanda leads off the dossier with an epigraph from Lúcia Murat, then details some of Brazil’s women filmmakers (notably Helena Solberg) who have shaped its cinematic territory without receiving the recognition they deserve. In so doing, she questions the models of “greatness” handed down since Cinema Novo and holds up the example of Petra Costa’s The Edge of Democracy as a “new paradigm” for documentary narration. Holanda considers Costa’s voice as narrator, previously criticized, as noteworthy for its hesitancy and absence of authority—qualities to counterpose to the masculinist authoritarianism ruling Brazil today.

André Brasil analyzes two key documentaries by Indigenous filmmakers, Zawxiperkwer Kaa – Guardiões da floresta (Guardians of the Forest, 2019), by Jocy and Milson Guajajara; and Ma’e Mimi’u Haw – A história dos cantos (The History of Chants, 2019), by Jamilson, Pollyana, Jacilda, and Lemilda Guajajara. Examining their visual and auditory strategies alongside the political circumstances of their creation, Brasil tracks the importance of the camera as both witness and tool, facing down invaders in the first film, opening up the mysteries of the forest in the second, supplying a “politics of regard” that is plural, local, engaged, and committed, while offering up a new model for documentary.

Janaína Oliveira, known for her work as a curator as well, here offers a detailed analysis of Black Brazilian cinema that centers Zózimo Bulbul, his eleven-minute masterpiece Alma no olho (Soul in the Eye, 1973), and the annual convening that Bulbul founded as inspiration and model. Establishing a theoretical model of the “black gaze,” she limns her 2019 Rotterdam exhibition to argue for the “strange and oppositional” aesthetic possibilities of this new cinema. Oliveira finds an ideal object in the astonishing República (Grace Passô, 2020), in which the favorite actress of the new film movement questions even the reality of “Brazil” in a gesture that Oliveira identifies with Tina Campt’s idea of the “refusal practice” required today.

Ivone Margulies studies the groundbreaking works of the Filmes de Plástico (FP) group, whose films embody a practice of “familiarity” that breaches the fourth wall between the set and the street, turning family into actors and actors into family. Analyzing their films Temporada (A Long Way Home, André Novais Oliveira, 2018) and No coração do mundo (In the Heart of the World, Gabriel Martins and Maurílio Martins, 2019), she invokes the notions of the portrait and the vista to trace the inner workings by which these narratives construct their hometown life through a process of “reciprocal contamination.”

Juliano Gomes considers the development of Black Brazilian cinema through a careful selection of works, including the short student works that have blazed a place for themselves already on the world stage. Analyzing Travessia (Safira Moreira, 2018) and the feature film Ilha (Island, Ary Rosa and Glenda Nicácio, 2018), he considers their “disruptive potential” in terms of the normative standards that have quickly developed to govern this sector. He argues for the power of these “strange” films that trouble the boundaries of representation and “refuse to offer comfort even when they openly stage joy.”

Kênia Freitas assesses the immense importance of the new film festivals founded in 2016–18: the Sergipe Festival of Black Cinema EGBÉ, Ceará’s Negritude Infinita festival, and Curitiba’s Mostra de Cinema Negro Brasileiro. Not just showcases, they work to combat and replace the “cognitive plantation” (citing Jota Mombaça’s phrase) that long subjugated Black filmmakers and artists to white curatorial standards. As these festivals reclaim black subjectivities through an “engaged cinema,” Freitas finds a way forward, “proposing a nonidentity” to inoculate the new films against commodification.

Fábio Andrade disputes the term “hybrid film,” challenging the concept through a keen analysis of two recent Brazilian films. Both Affonso Uchôa’s Sete anos em maio (Seven Years in May, 2019) and Ava Yvy Vera: A terra do povo do raio (Ava Yvy Vera: The Land of the Lightning People, 2017), directed by a group of first-time Guarani-Kaiowá filmmakers, incorporate an array of rhetorical strategies—including forms of reenactment, on-screen reconstitutions, and off-screen oral accounts—to reconstruct the invisible traumas visited upon marginalized populations by routines of oppression. Andrade challenges the authoritative inclinations of narration as much as he questions the by-now-mummified notions of hybridity.

This dossier would not be complete without the voices of the filmmakers. Tatiana Monassa and Natalia Brizuela have engineered a dialogue through their invitation to five different figures to share their formations, influences, and goals: Julia Katharine, Filipe Matzembacher, André Novais Oliveira, Marcio Reolon, and Patrícia Ferreira Pará Yxapy. Though a necessarily small sampling, these different voices indicate the extent of diverse origins, racial and gender identities, locations, sexualities, and interests that make up the richness and complexity of the vast social and cultural territory of today’s Brazilian cinema—and hint at the extent to which it is endangered.

Finally, in the Book Reviews section of this issue, Lívia Perez reviews three new books on Brazil’s underrecognized women directors. FQ breaks with tradition to include these, as they have yet to be translated or published in English editions. Let this be a statement in favor of escalating attention to Brazilian scholarship at a time of global political, environmental, and pandemic crisis that joins Brazil and the United States in a common need for cinematic powers of inspiration and rebellion.

The dossier concludes with a section devoted to the most critically successful Brazilian film of 2019, Bacurau, recognized with too many awards nationally and internationally to count, including a shared Jury Prize at Cannes, inclusion in major festivals throughout the world, and appearances on multiple lists of best films of the year, from Cahiers du Cinéma to the New York Times.

Bruno Guaraná aptly revisits the tropes and the landscape of the sertão as defined by Cinema Novo during its first phase in the early 1960s, exposing how it has been reconfigured in Bacurau to create a radical scenario of high tech in a community of activists who, instead of migrating to the big cities, decide to stay, defend, and fight for their land. He also recognizes the filmmakers’ debt to John Carpenter, including the direct reference captured in the name of one of its main protagonists, João Carpinteiro.

Marcelo Ikeda dissects Bacurau’s sources in the literature of Euclides da Cunha and through the model of Cinema Novo’s Glauber Rocha (who has served as a source of inspiration for so many). Further, Ikeda discusses power relations in the struggle of local populations for the right to remain on their own land and their fight against foreign invaders, arguing that Bacurau floats between the spectacles of film genre and of radical political allegory, shifting its balance throughout.

Jocimar Dias Jr. argues that Bacurau challenges its spectators’ reactions to violence, with detailed comparisons to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009). However, he contradicts the popular claim that film (and art in general) can ignite actual reactions of violence. For him, Bacurau is instead a revenge fantasy that revisits Brazil’s colonial history through a postapocalyptic landscape.

Beyond its surprising intertextual take on the cinematic genres of sci-fi, Western, horror/suspense, and magical realism, among others, Bacurau can be seen as a visionary text for today, a year and a half after its release. It opens and closes with coffins, many coffins, scattered along a bumpy road somewhere in the endless sertão of the Brazilian Northeast or lining the streets of the fictional quilombo village that gives the film its title. Over these familiar and traumatic images of dozens of coffins, a voice-over lists the names of victims of violence, interweaving and juxtaposing a continuous history of manslaughter, bloodshed, executions, and massacres dating back to the 1962 murder of peasant leader João Pedro Teixeira, subject of Eduardo Coutinho’s ever-timely documentary Cabra marcado para morrer (Twenty Years Later, Man Marked to Die, 1984) and forward to contemporary Brazil, with Marielle Franco and so many other (and ongoing) victims.

Today, however, the piles of coffins have acquired another meaning: they cannot help but summon fresh memories of the COVID-19 pandemic and the death toll amassed with the aid of bolsonarismo denials. Ahead of the facts on the ground, Bacurau offers up a visionary metaphor for neofascism and the current politics of genocide, national and transnational.

Fast-tracked and diligently produced to reach FQ readers as quickly as possible, the dossier is intended to intervene in this fraught historical moment, ensuring that the emergence of a vital cinema and theoretical scholarship is not lost to the depredations of governmental repression and pandemic threats. In such sobering times, it is more crucial than ever to mark with celebration the visionary power of fresh films and thinking. For resistance and persistence are not only the hallmarks of filmmaking or writing: they are key to the ability to continue to maintain a film culture capable of nourishing a future entirely different from the savage present in which these words have been written.

Note: João Luiz Vieira would like to thank Luiz Antonio L. Coelho, Eduardo Valente, Hadija Chalupe, and Emilie Lesclaux for their assistance. B. Ruby Rich would like to thank Natalia Brizuela and Lívia Perez for all their help.

Notes

1. See Christophe Dupin and editorial team, “Brazil’s Film Archive Is Facing Wipeout,” Sight & Sound, August 4, 2020, http://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/brazils-film-archive-facing-wipeout?. Also see Etienne Dumont, “La cinémathèque brésilienne risque bien de disparaître par volonté gouvernementale,” Bilan, August 30, 2020, http://www.bilan.ch/opinions/etienne-dumont/la-cinematheque-bresilienne-risque-bien-de-disparaitre-par-volonte-gouvernementale.
2. Cultural Property News staff, “Brazil: A New President Persecutes the Arts; History in Ashes, Art on the Rocks,” Cultural Property News, February 7, 2019, https://culturalpropertynews.org/brazil-a-new-president-persecutes-the-arts/.
3. Rafael de Luna in collaboration with ABPA (Brazilian Association of Audiovisual Preservation), “The Current Crisis,” arturita, n.d., https://arturita.net/the-current-crisis/.
4. For details, see the OCA/ANCINE report “Observatório Brasileiro de Cinema e do Audiovisual/Agência Nacional do Cinema,” Rio de Janeiro, June 22, 2020, 7–11.
5. The best source for information on the Agência Nacional do Cinema (ANCINE) and its Fundo Setorial do Cinema (FSA) can be found in Vera Zaverucha, Desvendando a Ancine (Rio de Janeiro: Edição do Autor, 2017), 231.
6. The pioneering work that charted this period is Randal Johnson and Robert Stam, eds., Brazilian Cinema, 3rd expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), especially the final chapter, “The Shape of Brazilian Cinema in the Postmodern Age,” by Robert Stam, João Luiz Vieira, and Ismail Xavier. See also Lúcia Nagib, The New Brazilian Cinema (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006); and Lisa Shaw and Stephanie Dennison, Brazilian National Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 36–40, 101–14.
7. See the recent conversation on this topic: Everlane Moraes, Janaína Oliveira, Kênia Freitas, and Tatiana Carvalho Costa, “Towards a Quilombo Cinema: An Afro-Brazilian Feminist Roundtable,” trans. Lillian Maguire and Natalia Davies, Another Gaze: A Feminist Film Journal, n.d., http://www.anothergaze.com/towards-quilombo-cinema-afro-brazilian-roundtable/.
8. See Film Quarterly 69, no. 3 (Spring 2016).
9. See also B. Ruby Rich’s editorial “Ending the Decade: Frankfurt, Marrakech, and 30/30 Vision,” in Film Quarterly 73, no. 3 (Spring 2020), with a report on Bolsonaro’s attack on ANCINE, accompanied by a photo of the jury at the Marrakech Film Festival wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the posters that the agency was ordered to remove from its walls. Tilda Swinton was president of the jury, Kleber Mendonça Filho a jury member.
10. For a discussion of Petra Costa’s film, see B. Ruby Rich, “Sundance 2019: Infiltrating the Scene,” Film Quarterly 72, no. 4 (Summer 2019): 87–92; for Karim Aïnouz’s and Sandra Kogut’s films, see B. Ruby Rich, “Toronto 2019: From Budapest to the Zeitgeist,” Film Quarterly 73, no. 2 (Winter 2019): 93–99. For more on Karim Aïnouz’s A Vida Invisível, see Manuel Betancourt’s column, “Melodrama, Telenovela, and the New Latin American Women’s Picture,” in this issue.
11. For more details, see José de Aguiar, Júlio Bezerra, and Marina Pessanha, O novo cinema pernambucano (Rio de Janeiro: Conde de Irajá, 2014), 159.
12. In 2018, Padilha directed a controversial series for Globo television, O mecanismo (The Mechanism), that portrayed the Car Wash Scandal through a version promulgated by right-wing forces to demonize the Workers Party. A sequel was funded under the auspices of bolsonarismo and released in spring 2019.
13. The editors would like to thank the participants in that initial planning meeting: FQ Editorial Board members Natalia Brizuela, Ivone Margulies, Manuel Betancourt, Nilo Couret, and Bruno Guaraná, with added input from Lívia Perez.

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