Beyond the Favela: New Brazilian Cinema

National stereotypes are perhaps a necessary evil: by attaching simplistic labels to the people of this world, we fill gaps in our knowledge. Such lazy typecasting is often raised and nurtured through film and Brazil in particular has ensured itself a damaging infamy in this area. The huge success of the kinetic masterpiece City of God, for instance, led to a spate of exaggerated, highly stylised tellings of deranged drug lords and sashaying samba girls. With this in mind, Glasgow Film Festival aims to look beyond the favelas with its expertly programmed New Brazilian Cinema strand.

While earlier films such as Bus 174 and Carandiru fiercely questioned the country's social order, the Brazilian film in the GFF programme often take on a wider political scope, searching for insight into where the rapidly changing nation might rest as the ideological plates of the world grind against one another. Some guy once said that for an understanding of the future, we must consult the past, and this is precisely what director Camilo Tavares sets out to do with his documentary The Day that Lasted 21 Years, the story of covert US interference in South America during the Cold War. We move forward from this post-colonial meddling to an ever darker date, 1978, with Prime Time Soap, in which a military dictatorship hunts political dissidents while others simply wish to escape into the aspirational fantasies of the disco in Dancin’ Days, a hot new telenovela. Highly styled 70s kitsch make for a refreshing change to the poverty porn so often made for slumming cinephiles. It’s important not to gloss over the world’s awkward truths but at the same time one mustn't revel smugly in its injustice. 

When Claudio Assis takes us back to the gutter with Rat Fever, he delivers street poetry that's both verbal and visual. Here is a lyrical film of stanzas and melodic imagery which finally allows Brazil’s creative leftfield slackers to be heard above the aggressive playground bullies of the well known favela features. It opens with a gorgeous floating monochrome of waterways and bridges, reminiscent in style and tone to Lou Ye’s Suzhou River, a pertinent comparison as both Brazil and China are facing seismic cultural and economic shifts. It is with meticulous timing, then, that GFF have concentrated its and our thoughts here, in advance of Rio’s upcoming Olympics and World Cup finals, when all cameras will centre upon the city.

Maybe its cinema’s job to show a little of life’s wild side, to thrill us with danger and depravity. But in reality we mostly exist among shades of grey. The excellent films in this series show that there's far more to Rio than gun-toting toddlers.