Júlio Bressane

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(…) Ferreira finest and most political film is Horror Palace Hotel. This forty-minute piece does many things at once: it is an essay about the state of Brazilian cinema, which unfortunately has not yet dated enough; a spot-on look at how film functions within a film festival; a haunted house movie; and a contagious narrative. It was shot during the 1978 Brasilia Film Festival, where a small horror sidebar is going on, in the hotel where everyone that works around the festival (filmmakers, journalists) is staying. This most angry of Ferreira’s films, it is his most focused on achieving, through close observation and a perfect structure, both physical precision and an ambitious allegorical tendency. Using Rogério Sganzerla as a guide and José Mojica Marins as a main object, Horror Palace Hotel slowly arrives at its central targets by transgressing all borders. The horror sidebar becomes something much larger, thanks to Ferreira’s camera: it becomes whole repressed history of Brazilian cinema. Horror, we learn, is not just a genre there anymore, but everything that does not fit into official history; the film thus restages an invasion of the official event by those who represent the repressed. A new history of cinematic forms takes over.Read More »

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Starting with the screening of O Mandarim in 1996, Júlio Bressane became a regular at IFFR — one of its patron saints, one could even say, as many of his films were selected for later editions. In 2000, the festival honoured the cinema marginal paragon with one of the first comprehensive retrospectives on his work outside his native Brazil. It is, thus, more than fitting that Bressane’s extensive reflection on his six decades of filmmaking, The Long Voyage of the Yellow Bus, done in tandem with Rodrigo Lima, is one of IFFR 2023’s centrepieces!Read More »

“If you had to choose between me and your mother, who would it be?” Capitu asks provocatively of her problematic lover. Elsewhere, they dance to inaudible music, with their friends, each couple keeping to a rhythm of their own. At times, this depiction of the memories we see one Dom Casmurro commit to paper with a flamboyant pen seems to be an interplay of conflicting emotions – particularly when jealousy raises its head.Read More »

Julio Bressane wrote:
“When I made O Anjo Nasceu I thought I had made my most difficult film, a completely irresponsible film, that space, that vacuum, that nothing. It was a devastating experience for me, a shock. Much, much more than Matou a Família e Foi ao Cinema, which was a well-received film. I think O Anjo Nasceu is still unknown territory, even for me”Read More »

Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil@IMDb wrote:
A dysfunctional family, composed of a prostitute and two gays, one strong and the other fragile and stupid, lives a routine life in Rio de Janeiro. When the slut threatens the other two to stop supporting them, they decide to find an odalisque as an alternative to keep their easy life.Read More »

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A man, sort of penpusher living in the darkness of books or in a ruined house with his dying mother, watches out for of a radiant, rich young girl. Her father meanwhile seems to organize some political trick with accomplices.Read More »

The pleasure, where it does not end

Love is also time suspended by the word, the language – Portuguese in this case – which invites itself into the body, which hypnotizes them and returns them to a happy flesh. All of Bressane’s staging can be found there, all of this surprising and obvious invention, that is to say alive. In its rhythm, in its editing, in its ruptures, its winks and even its obscurities which we know all come out of the same passion …
A triangle – three beings – suspended in desire, a desire that hangs on all their gestures.Read More »

Documentary about Brazilian pop diva Maria Bethânia, in one of her first shows in Rio de Janeiro. The film also show scenes of her daily life and meetings with other musicians.Read More »

A delicate and tenacious writer, widowed three years ago, engages in frequent conversations with a parrot. However, she’s always observed by a large portion of raw meat.Read More »