Ocidente

Seventy critics and filmmakers discuss cinema around the conflict between the artist and the observer, the creator and the critic. Between 1998 and 2007, Kléber Mendonça Filho recorded testimonies about this relationship in Brazil, the United States and Europe, based on his experience as a critic.

No measure of hellfire preaching can quell the boisterous and bawdy passions of Maracatu, an Afro-Brazilian burlesque carnival tradition with roots in slavery that takes place in the northeast state of Pernambuco. As the Falstaffian character Tiao, Valmir do Coco leads a nonprofessional cast of authentic Maracatu practitioners in a tale told through dance, music, and the supernatural, set in the sugarcane fields outside Recife.

In the Kuikuro homeland of the Upper Xingu in central Brazil, the community is called upon to make preparations for the Jamurikumalu ritual: a traditional festival of singing and dancing that is performed only by women. However, complications arise when an elderly woman is seriously ill. With refreshing frankness and exuberance, this extraordinary documentary follows the Kuikuro people in a race against time to preserve the knowledge of their elders and the practice of their traditions before they are lost forever.

Recife, undergoing so many changes, was the scene of a party of joy and tension, sports and politics. A happy experience, but full of the contradictions that make Brazil be Brazil and here wins the face and the space of Recife.

A small-scale romantic love story, shot with a digital camera in black & white and in a documentary style. We follow the conversation between two lovers, each on a different side of the world; he is in Recife, she is in Kyiv. On one side is dark, on the other light, but both experience the same emotions and hence feel nearness and contact.

When radical science backfires, miners and researchers confront apocalypse in Tiago Melo’s pulpy, politically charged sci-fi fusing local myth, dark humour, working-class grit and radioactivity in Brazil’s Northeast.