Special Screenings

This year, the Special Screenings Section continues with a reduced, albeit no less powerful selection. Always showcasing films from the great masters of cinema and striving to (re)discover works, the section will focus on national cinema from two Brazilian feature films and expand its horizons with a Hongkongese film, as yet unreleased in Brazil.

Capitu and the Chapter reveals Júlio Bressane’s gaze upon the novel Dom Casmurro, featuring Mariana Ximenes, Enrique Diaz, Vladimir Brichta, and Djin Sganzerla among the outstanding cast; The Good Cinema, directed by Eugênio Puppo, sets out to tell the story of the emergence of Marginal Cinema, also known as Cinema Pós-Novo; finally, never-before-screened in Brazil and directed by an anonymous collective known as “Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers”, the film Inside the Red Brick Wall offers a compelling account of pro-democracy protests at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in November 2019.

CAPITU AND THE CHAPTER
/ CAPITU E O CAPÍTULO
Júlio Bressane | Brazil, 2021, 75’
If the worms know nothing about the texts they gnaw, Julio Bressane is both intimate with their flavors and an inexhaustible companion to the work of Machado de Assis. Unlike the first breaths may suggest, the film is not quite an adaptation of “Dom Casmurro”, but rather an essayistic dance to the rhythm of a singular style: transient chapters that magnify the narrator and present, through Capitu’s trenchant personality and Bentinho’s wavering responses, a redefinition of the traditional duos within the eternal cornerstone of the cinema of invention. (Leonardo Bomfim)

THE GOOD CINEMA
/ O BOM CINEMA
Eugênio Puppo | Brazil, 2021, 82’
For over a decade challenging the policy of erasure that burns and haunts the memory of national cinema, Eugênio Puppo revisits the emergence of one of the most notorious generations of filmmakers in the country, exploring the close and unusual relationship between a papal encyclical and the emergence of Cinema Marginal. Comprised of a rich collection of archival material and images, the film becomes a genuine time capsule, echoing in the present (in a direct nod to the future) the confrontational voices and images of Reichenbach, Sganzerla, Mojica, and many others. (Camila Macedo)

INSIDE THE RED BRICK WALL
/ 理大圍城
Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers | Hong Kong, 2020, 88’
November 2019: After six months of street protests against newly enacted freedom-restrictive laws, Hong Kong students decide to occupy the polytechnic university. For fourteen days, they live in the building, surrounded and isolated by the police in what gradually turns into a prison. A film made by individually unidentified filmmakers, focused on a group of characters where the collective speaks louder, in a story constructed all the while it is lived. Cinema as an absolute need for expression and a record of our time, shown in its myriad contradictions and uncertainties. (Eduardo Valente)