Traffic on the roads of São Paulo, old family photographs, and the voice-over tale of Arthur Alvaro de Noronha, a doctor coming back from Paris after finishing his Medicine studies in Europe. Arthur with his family, Arthur in Paris… The voice tells us of the doctor’s adventures with friends André Breton, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, and Pablo Picasso. This is how Omar announces the surrealist biography he weaves in Triste Trópico around the figure of an imaginary doctor who ends up as indigenous messiah. Described as a “anthropological mock documentary,” Triste Trópico is a film whose title alludes to Levi-Strauss’s ethnographic memoirs of Brazil and triggers a chain of evocative references to the carnival-cannibal avant-garde of Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto.Read More »