SXSW: The dystopian visions of Executive Order & Witch Hunt

By Abe Friedtanzer

 

It’s sadly not all that difficult to imagine our society slipping into dystopian territory, and while that might have seemed impossible here in America, recent events have suggested we’re not that far away from authoritarian misery. Cinema has long explored such inevitabilities, and it’s those “very near future” concepts that don’t look so different from what we know today that can be especially terrifying. They can also be insightful, strong pieces of filmmaking, and SXSW has two this year that are indeed frightening and thought-provoking...

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Brazil and Oscar

by Nathaniel R

In today's big "international feature" news, Denmark has selected EFA frontrunner Another Round for its submission but we already covered Denmark so let's move southwest to a country that also just announced. They've struggled to return to the Oscar lineup since their golden heyday, the late 1990s, when they had three nominees in a four year span. Brazil has selected Babenco: Tell Me When I Die for its Oscar submission this year. It's a documentary about the last years of Hector Babenco's life, directed by his widow Barbara Paz. Oscar voters are already familiar with Babenco, of course, since he made quite an international splash in the 1980s with films like Pixote, Ironweed, and the Oscar-nominated Kiss of the Spider-Woman. It's an interesting choice for a submission though it's not likely to be nominated given Oscar's general resistance to documentaries about film (strange that, since they love narrative features about filmmaking). Still, we're eager to see it.

The Film Experience has always enjoyed a surprisingly robust Brazilian following, so we feel affection. Let's look at films and stats and key submissions.

BRAZIL'S OSCAR STATS

Submitting since 1960 
49 Total Submissions 
4 Nominations (and 1 Additional Finalist)
0 Wins 

<--- Special case: The classic Black Orpheus, a French/Brazilian co-production won the 1959 Oscar. But that was before Brazil was submitting and so it's officially a French winner even though it's set in Brazil and in Portugueuse...

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1981: Marília Pêra in "Pixote"

Please welcome new contributor Nick Taylor who is providing us with extra Supporting Actress pleasure inbetween the Smackdown events.

How close was Hector Babenco’s Pixote to an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 1980? Or rather, why was it disqualified? Already lauded in Brazil for its unflinching, documentary-style depiction of the country’s unique epidemic of child criminality and the institutions benefitting from it, the film got axed for doing test screenings outside The Academy’s allotted time frame. That sounds as "necessary" as many of their eligibility nitpicks. Disqualified from consideration for 1980, Pixote became fair game upon its U.S. release in 1981, winning most of the critics prizes for Best Foreign Language Film and scoring a Golden Globe nomination over Oscar’s eventual winner, Hungary's Mephisto.

Pixote also won Best Film from Boston, who took a page from the National Society of Film Critics and gave Marília Pêra their Best Actress award. And while her performance absolutely deserved those prizes...

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Don't Miss "Invisible Life"

by Cláudio Alves

After a limited release in US theaters, Karim Aïnouz's Invisible Life is now available to stream on Amazon Prime. The film was Brazil's submission for last year's Best International Feature Oscar and, although the Academy chose to overlook its merits, that doesn't mean the picture is undeserving of our attention. This tropical melodrama is one of 2019's most ravishing cinematic experiences, a saturated explosion of deep feeling and chromatic excess, as beautiful as it is devastating. Harkening back to the glory days of Old Hollywood's women's pictures, Invisible Life is like a cocktail made of equal parts Douglas Sirk and Black Orpheus, a hint of Fassbinder adding an abrasive zing to the recipe…

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Interview: Karim Aïnouz on 'Invisible Life' and why he chose to make a melodrama

by Murtada Elfadl

With a depth of feeling and lush gorgeous colors that knock the wind out of you, Invisible Life is melodrama done right. Set in Rio de Janeiro in 1950 as two inseparable sisters have different dreams. One, Euridice played by Carol Duarte, wants to become a renowned pianist. The romantic Guida (Julia Stockler) yearns for true love. They are separated by their father and forced to live apart. They take control of their separate destinies, while never giving up hope of finding each other. We follow their story with ache in our hearts but with our eyes feasting on the beauty that fills the frame.

We got a chance to speak with director Karim Aïnouz recently in New York. [This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.]

Murtada Elfadl: Congratulations. The film is amazing.

Karim Aïnouz: Thank you. Thank you. That's good to hear

One of the things that I really love about it I grew up on Egyptian movies, which are very melodramatic.

Are you Egyptian?

I'm Sudanese.

Okay, let's go. Yeah. Okay.

So this reminded me of all the movies that I loved growing up. It's very lush.The emotions are very big. It's about family, it's about women. So I wanted to ask you about that first. Melodrama is not that respected these days. Were you afraid or concerned to make a melodrama?

It's like that for me too, I was raised on melodrama. I was raised bathing in melodrama because that's the genre root of Brazilian soap operas, radio soap operas and novellas in the 50s and then that sort of led onto the soap operas of the 70s when I was growing up...

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