In October, Doclisboa, in partnership with Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema, presents a rare complete retrospective of the Brazilian filmmaker Carlos Reichenbach, one of the protagonists of Brazilian Marginal Cinema. This important film movement, along with Cinema Novo, originated in the 60s from São Paulo’s slum Boca De Lixo, at the height of the military dictatorship’s repression, as a response to the instability experienced in the country.
Pervaded by the political context and the censorship imposed by the military forces, Marginal Cinema differs from Cinema Novo due to a more underground and experimental form of expression. It radicalized its cinematographic language, exploring its stances and experiences, but expanding its narrative, aesthetic and social forms beyond the conventional limits.
Carlos Reichenbach, one of the most important avant-garde authors of this generation, explored different genres and aesthetics between thriller, porn and experimental cinema. Its stylistic heterogeneity was essential to preserve creative freedom dealing with the socio-political and economic situations, defining cinema as a gesture of revolt against the established world.
The retrospective unveils a five decades filmography, including several films that have never been shown outside Brazil before. An ode to utopia, dream and desire.
Carlos Reichenbach’s work joins the already announced The Colonial Question Retrospective, a programme that travels between 1950 and the present day, examining the history of colonization, wars and fights for independence in African countries. A past common to France and Portugal but, above all, to Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Algeria, Tunisia, Senegal, Mali and Niger, among others. The programme aims to discuss this common past based on the documentary cinema of René Vautier and Margarida Cardoso, the fictional reconstructions of José Cardoso, Licínio Azevedo and Assia Djebar, or the debate on the very idea of reconstruction by Ruy Guerra and by the duo Filipa César and Sónia Vaz-Borges.
In October, this retrospective is intended to present, within the scope of the Saison France-Portugal 2022, this cinema that witnessed colonialism, seeking to depict the images of a world that was deprived by Western empires.
