Brazil

When Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, slashed public funding for the arts earlier this year, the director of the country’s top film festival knew her event was in trouble. “We realized we wouldn’t have the funding to put together a festival … We were hit really hard,” said Ilda Santiago, who has been running the Rio international film festival for two decades and had faced years of eroding local government support. A public plea for support and months of desperate campaigning followed – including a crowdfunding drive that helped earn the festival a stay of execution. After a one-month delay, Brazil’s premiere film expo will open on Monday – albeit with a slimmed-down program of just 190 films, compared with up to 400 before. But the festival’s fight for survival is symptomatic of a wider crisis engulfing Brazilian cinema under an ultra-conservative president who has identified the arts as a key source of … [Read more...] about ‘The government is strangling cinema’: Brazil film industry fights for survival

Wagner Schwartz received the first death threat two days after lying naked on the floor of a museum in São Paulo. It was October 2017 and the Brazilian artist had invited members of his audience, which included children, to adjust his body: move a limb, roll him over, that kind of thing. This was for a dance piece called La Bête, a work he had already staged many times at home and abroad. So it was a shock to suddenly find himself the target of an increasingly emboldened network of rightwing and evangelical Christian groups. During La Bête, a four-year-old girl, encouraged by her mother, lifted Schwartz’s hand and then his foot, while another slightly older girl touched his head. These moments were caught on video and uploaded to Facebook. “The creators of this page,” says Schwartz, “put a caption on the video saying the museum incited paedophilia and that I was a paedophile. From this moment on, people who did not know me or the work decided La … [Read more...] about Death threats and denunciations: the artists who fear Bolsonaro’s Brazil

“Brazil is divided,” declared writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho at the Cannes film festival on Wednesday, where his new film, Aquarius, is competing for the Palme d’Or. His comments, made to the Guardian at a press conference for the drama on Wednesday, come a day after the film’s premiere, where the cast and crew used the opportunity to mount a protest against what they describe as a coup. Filho and his team are angered about the the recent impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff, the country’s first female president, who was forced from office, as well as interim president Michel Temer’s controversial decision to abolish Brazil’s culture ministry. Temer has since sought to tamp down the criticism by appointing a culture secretary, but four potential candidates have reported refusing the job. “They picked the wrong month to extinguish the ministry of culture, because a movie made with very public funds is currently competing in … [Read more...] about ‘Brazil is divided’: Aquarius star Sonia Braga and director address Cannes protests

The cast and crew of Aquarius, an acclaimed Brazilian drama in competition at Cannes have used the film’s official premiere to mount a protest as what they see as a coup in their country. Writer-director Kleber Mendonca Filho, along with his cast and crew, climbed the steps to the Palais in Cannes before revealing a selection of banners apparently objecting to the recent impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff. The protest was met by ecstatic applause inside the cinema. Audience members then joined in by holding aloft similar banners. Aquarius is about an ageing music critic, played by Sonia Braga, eager to remain in her apartment despite developer pressure. Yet it is not an overtly political film, instead meditating on shifting familial allegiances and the way space intersects with identity. The film was made before the current political crisis in Brazil, which has seen the country’s first female president forced from office, protesting her innocence about the crimes of … [Read more...] about ‘Brazil is not a democracy’: Cannes contender’s cast stage red carpet protest

Brazil’s justice minister has described his country’s violent and overcrowded prison system as “terrible” and warned that it will only get worse if congress votes this week to lower the age of criminal responsibility. José Eduardo Cardozo ordered the early publication of a justice ministry report on prison overcrowding ahead of a vote on Tuesday over legislation which would reduce the age of criminal responsibility from 18 to 16 for serious offences involving violence. The new statistics show that Brazil’s prison population has doubled in the last 10 years and now contains more than 220,000 inmates over its capacity. Lowering the age of criminal responibility will add up to 40,000 more inmates to the system, Cardozo said. Brazil has the world’s fourth-largest prison population, after the US, China and Russia, but while the number of prisoners in those countries has declined over recent years, in Brazil it grew by 33% between 2008 and 2014. … [Read more...] about Brazil’s prison system faces ‘profound deterioration’ if youth crime law passes