Tag: Marcelo Gomes

Portrait of a Certain Orient (Retrato de um Certo Oriente)

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Marcelo Gomes’ eight feature film begins at some point after WW2 in a convent on the mountains of Lebanon. Emir (Zakaria Kaakour) storms into the secluded building with a gun to hand and threatens to kill himself right in front of the sisters unless they allow the beautiful Emilie (Wafa’a Celine Halawi) to depart with him. Only a man wildly in love would do that for a woman, correct? Indeed right. The problem is that Emir is in reality Emilie’s brother. He possesses a pathological and borderline incestuous jealousy of his stunningly beautiful and outgoing sister, with a genuine loving smile. His physique and his psychology are far less impressive: Emir is short, scrawny, socially awkward and perhaps with a mild learning disability. Not quite the picture of virility.

He reveals that to his sibling that he sold their parents’ house so that they can move to Brazil, a country teeming with job opportunities. This is where swathes of European, Lebanese, Syrian, and people of many other nationalities chose to settle throughout the 20th century. We see images and hear testimonials by these immigrants – Lebanese, Polish, Italian, etc – on the extremely long boat journey. First they cross the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and then the Amazon River as they head towards the Brazilian El Dorado, the fast-growing city of Manaus. This is where Emilie becomes romantically involved with a handsome Libyan-born Lebanese called Omar (Charbel Kamel), thus infuriating her extremely insecure brother. Emir explains that his hate of Omar is related to their creed: Omar is a Muslim, while the two siblings are Christians. Religion obviously isn’t the only reason for such deep-seated sentiment. There are more things in heaven and earth.

Entirely filmed in crisp black and white and with a broad spectrum of lenses distorting and emphasising the vastness of the jungle, Portrait of a Certain Orient has an impressive cinematography signed by Marcelo Gomes’ regular collaborator Pierre de Kerchove. The close-up of the Amazon plants are exquisite, while snapshots of immigrants and Amazon dance/culture have a distinct vintage feel, as well as an anthropological value. Brazil is a country defined by consecutive waves of immigration, and Portrait provides a visual register of this phenomenon. This is an elegant, atmospheric and melancholic art film with exuberant images waiting to be contemplated. Indeed a portrait.

The international cast includes Brazilian, Emirati, Lebanese and Italian actors, in a film spoken in Arabic, French and Portuguese. Halawi is extremely captivating, particularly as her character dabbles with her first Portuguese words (Omar becomes her language teacher, as he had previously been to Brazil). It is precisely over these lessons that they begin to bond, and the couple have an undeniable chemistry. The performances are entirely auspicious, however secondary to the gently framed imagery. Some of the most intense and dramatic moments are toned down in favour of the photography. Aesthetics often prevail above dramaturgy.

Based on Milton Hatoum’s novel Report of a Certain Orient (himself an Amazonian Brazilian born to Lebanese parents), this slow and contemplative movie is extremely Brazilian in more ways than one. The ardent sensuality is more closely associated with the Latin American nation than with Lebanon. And the topic of multiple males fighting for an astounding woman with bloody consequences is a common theme in Brazilian cinema and indeed in Hatoum’s bibliography (Sergio Machado’s River of Desire, from 2022, is based on another book of his books, and the two plots have remarkable similarities). Arab cinema is less used to such frank sexuality, and to the idea that men should compete for a woman. I wonder how Middle Eastern audiences will enjoy this Brazilian delicacy.

Portrait of a Certain Orient just premiered at the 53rd International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Waiting for the Carnival (Estou me Guardando Para Quando o Carnaval Chegar)

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Toritama has 40,00o inhabitants and it’s located in the hinterlands of the Northeastern Brazil, the poorest region in the country. Historically, the town depended on agriculture and livestock. Forty years ago it was a very silent and quiet place. It has since become the Brazilian capital of jeans, in charge of 20% of Brazil’s produce. The serenity has been substituted by the hustle and bustle of thriving trade, seven days a week. The silence has been replaced by the noise of the manufacturing devices: sewing machines, gigantic dyeing sprayers, laser printers. A former chicken farm has been converted into a factory. Only one chicken is left. Her name is Sara Jane, and she’s the factory’s mascot, and a reminder of a not-so-distant past.

Waiting for the Carnival lends an entire new meaning to the expression “feeling the blues”, and not just because of the colour of the fabric being locally produced. The people at the coalface have turned a menial and repetitive job into a thoroughly enjoyable trade. They are not sad, they are not sullen. Their joie-de-vivre is palpable. Their humour is fascinating. Their ambition is refreshing. Everyone without exception is extremely hard-working and ambitious. And that’s for two reasons: they are autonomous workers and they get paid pro rata (according to the amount manufactured). They are genuinely persistent and motivated to work up to 14 hours a day seven days a week because that’s their personal choice. They can stop whenever they wish, and they can harvest the benefits for as long as they want.

The sensibility and the inventiveness of Brazilian director Marcelo Gomes are extraordinary. At one point, he wilfully removes the sound of the sewing machines abruptly and halfway through the sequence, replacing it with soothing music, and thereby also meditating on the “anguish of repetition”. The main character Leonardo is extremely funny, cheeky and yet tender, epitomising the spirit of the movie itself.

These hard-working people have one ambition in common: the escapism of carnival. They are prepared to work even harder and to sell anything valuable (such as a TV, a fridge or a motorbike) in exchange for a few days of hedonism. “I want to laugh, what’s life good for if I can’t have fun”, says a woman. Leonardo, however, does not manage to earn the money needed. The filmmaker then makes a very deft and generous proposition to the young man. The director offers to pay for Leonardo’s carnival expenses if Leonardo films the festivities for his documentary. Such ingeniousness is sublime. The director empowers his subject. For the next 10 minutes or so we watch the images captured by Leonardo. The quality of the equipment is clearly inferior, but not the emotions conveyed.

The film wraps up with the magnificent titular song Estou Me Guardando Para Quando o Carnaval Chegar, a Brazilian classic by composed by the iconic Chico Buarque. The tune is played in its entirety by a local music group.

Waiting for the Carnival showed in the 69th Berlin International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It sees its UK premiere at the Sheffield Doc Fest in June.

Joaquim

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Few Europeans know that the Independence of Brazil took place as late as in 1822, nearly half a century after the US and also posterior to most countries in the continent. And mostpeopl remain oblivious to the fact that the largest country of Latin America was the last one to abolish slavery in the New World. Joaquim goes back in time to the late 18th century and opens up the wounds of colonisation, exposing a deeply corrupt Brasil where racism and subservience to the Portuguese Crown prevail.

Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, nicknamed Tiradentes, was a leading member of a failed revolutionary movement fighting for Brazilian Independence. Joaquim was arrested tried, decapicated and quartered. The pieces of his body where publicly exhibited in order silence any sort of dissent. His execution on April 21st later became a public holiday in Brazil, and Tiradentes is now celebrated as a national hero and a martyr, the film explains in the opening by the means of a voiceover.

The revolutionary figure is played by the Júlio Machado: he has long-hair, olive skin and a rough, manly complexion. He looks like some sort of cowboy Jesus Christ from the Brazilian Backlands. He is a lieutenant hunting illegal gold-diggers on behalf of Queen Maria of Portugal. He is enamoured with the slave Blackie (the exceptionally beautiful Portuguese-Angolan Isabél Zuaa, pictured above), but he does not have enough money to buy her. He gradually begins to despise the system to which he belongs, realising that Brazil would be much better off without the rule of the Portuguese Crown.

Director Marcelo Gomes reveals an exhuberant country teeming with diverse cultures, races and languages. You will listen to Brazilian Portuguese, Creoule Portuguese, as well as African and Indigenous languages – all of which except for the first have but disappeared since. There’s African singing, indigenous yodelling and a Portuguese guitar. It would be safe to say that the filmmaker did a very good job with his homework in anthropology.

With equal success, the director also debunks the colonial myth of moral supremacy. The Portuguese often described the Brazilians as “bandits, corrupts and lazybones”, but Joaquim realises that this a reflection of their own flawed character, and a vain attempt to patronise and to demoralise Brazilians. That’s when he decides to switch allegiances and to fight for the ideals of independence, influenced by the teachings of Rousseau.

Joaquim is not the only film in the Berlinale this year to deal with the subject of a coloniser describing the colonised as inferior. Viceroy’s House (Gurinder Chadha) reveals a profoundly racist Churchill who said that Indians were “primitive”. Both Britain and Portugal shared a delusional sense of racial superiority. But have they now overcome these prejudices?

There’s a very short dialogue that’s central to the movie, when Joaquim expresses his desire for Brazil to be like the US. He hazards a guess that everyone in the former British colony is now free and equal, and that such a nation would never be oppressive towards others. The director is making a tongue-in-cheek commentary about the hypocrisy of Americans Imperialism.

Joaquim is showing in the Official Competition of the 67th Berlin International Film Festival, and it’s a viable contender for the much coveted Golden Bear. DMovies is following the event live – just click here for more information.

Don’t forget to watch the teaser trailer below: