Adventures of a Gringa

Way Beyond Weight

Maria Farinha Filmes, the company behind 2012's "Way Beyond Weight" (Muito Além do Peso), released the movie on Vimeo recently, so it's available for worldwide viewing.

The film sheds light on Brazil's child obesity epidemic, ranging from this terrifying statistic about infant soda consumption to the fact that on average, Brazilian kids spend three hours per day in school and five hours per day watching TV. The movie also looks at the fact that obesity in general is a growing problem in Brazil. It points out, for example, that Brazilians consume an average of 112 pounds of sugar a year.

But perhaps what's most interesting about the movie is putting Brazil's obesity epidemic into a global perspective as a result of deepening globalization. While interviewing Brazilians across the country from all levels of the socioeconomic spectrum, the movie also includes foreign voices, including people from the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and Mexico, among others. One Brazilian observer explains her perspective that a country is defined by the food it eats, and that it is not necessarily a good thing to be able to go anywhere in the world and eat the same exact thing. There's also an interesting point that applies to other large growing economies: parents sometimes send unhealthy processed food for children's school meals to show off a new ability to consume, and giving kids products they may not have had access to when they were young.

Watch the documentary here:

MUITO ALÉM DO PESO from Maria Farinha Filmes on Vimeo.

Interview with Kleber Mendonça Filho

Kleber Mendonça Filho is the kind of writer who believes you should write what you know. His latest film "Neighboring Sounds," which he wrote and directed, takes place in his hometown of Recife, and most was shot on his block and even in his own home. But he's also a fan of horror movies and science fiction. He's made short films of both genres, from "A menina do algodão" (2002), based on a local legend, to "Recife Frio" (2009), a fantastic mockumentary about a cold spell that takes over the northern Brazilian city. He's one of the most exciting directors in Brazil at the moment, one who's changing the course of Brazilian cinema.

I interviewed Mendonça in Recife by phone after meeting him briefly in New York, where he came to promote his new movie and accept the award for best film of the year from Cinema Tropical. "Neighboring Sounds" has won accolades the world over, including being named one of the best movies of 2012 by The New York Times. A movie programmer in Recife and a former movie critic, Mendonça told me he wanted to make a film that he would like to watch. From the perspective of a viewer, Mendonça wanted to focus on what he calls "small-scale incidents," the day-to-day occurrences that make up daily life. "I've never been involved in shootouts, and I don't carry guns," he said. "My life is interesting enough." The movie focuses largely on the daily lives of middle- and upper-class families living in Recife, and their relationships with their working-class employees.

The Middle Class as a Protagonist

Mendonça noted that Brazil's middle class is not normally part of Brazilian cinema. At a January screening of the director's short films at New York's Museum of the Moving Image, he explained there's now a "huge discussion going on" since the new movie showed an intimacy with this group. The film also zeroes in on class tensions, which Mendonça said are part of Brazilian society and "make Brazilians tic." "For me, it's obvious because it's part of our lives," he said. In several of his films, Mendonça spotlights the maid's room, which can be found in many Brazilian homes and evolved from slave quarters.

For Mendonça, it was natural to focus on the middle class, since that's where he comes from. "That's what I understand," he told me. "I'm familiar with the way people think and behave." He said many people told him how much they identified with situations in the film. "That's what the arts are all about, really; they tell you something about what you understand or something that you feel," he noted. But he was taken aback that people thought the film was original for focusing on this group. "There's nothing revolutionary about this," he said. "It baffles me." He cited a film called "O Invasor" (The Trespasser) that influenced his work, and touches on similar themes. When he saw it a decade ago, he wondered: "Why don't we make films like that?"

Brazil's Frenzy of Consumerism

"Neighboring Sounds," as well as the 2005 short "Eletrodoméstica," were inspired in part by the boom in consumerism after the Real Plan in 1994. Mendonça was first struck by the phenomenon during a family trip to the United States in the early 1990s when he saw Brazilians bringing piles of VCRs, microwaves, and fax machines back to Brazil. He was also struck by an incident involving the winning Brazilian team during the 1994 World Cup in Los Angeles: the players and entourage brought home 17 tons of baggage filled with purchases after their win.

Before inflation was conquered and imports opened up, Brazil had a "strange kind of capitalism that was very similar to life in communism," Mendonça said. "I remember a time when you would go to the supermarket in the morning and in the afternoon, the prices would have gone up." There were very few choices when it came to buying electronics or cars, but after 1994, he began noticing people "going crazy with consumerism." Even though things have changed since then, Mendonça noted, Brazil still has a developing consumer culture, with new money coming in and a growing C class.

Breaking the Mold of a Domestic Film

With a limited budget, "Neighboring Sounds" has had success because people are discovering the film, which Mendonça admits doesn't usually happen. "It's slowly stepping out of the place where the market says it’s supposed to be and supposed to stay," he said. The film was well-received in Brazil, which isn't always the case. The term filme nacional, or domestic film, could sometimes be spoken as a derogatory term. A recent Carta Capital article declared Brazil a "cultural wasteland," with the exception of "Neighboring Sounds." Mendonça disagreed with this assessment, but noted that this perception of Brazilian films does exist. On Twitter, he's seen people comment on the movie, saying, "Well, it's nacional, but it's actually quite good," or "It's so good that it feels like an Argentine film." The solution, Mendonça believes, is to create more good movies and to expose viewers to different kinds of films. "Cinema is many different voices in the whole world, not only American or Hollywood voices," he said.

Connecting History to the Present

One important element of "Neighboring Sounds" is a clear connection between the past to the present, from showing black and white photos at the beginning to showing crumbling buildings in rural Pernambuco. There's also a mirroring of class relationships from colonial times to the present. At the end of the film, one can't help but wonder how much things have changed. Mendonça, the son of a historian, says he intuitively tries to understand where things come from. "I try not to be nostalgic," he said. Though some people would say the film begins with old pictures, "for me, they're just pictures," Mendonça explained. "That's what we're living now, but in black and white." If you drive 40 kilometers outside of Recife and shoot photos without color, Mendonça told me, you'll get the same images.

The Genre Film Gap

Brazilian genre films aren't taken seriously by critics, Mendonça lamented. There are no Brazilian horror movies, except for Zé do Caixão, and no science fiction; these types of movies are often dismissed as being unrealistic. Mendonça made a choice with "Neighboring Sounds" not to venture into this realm by say, landing a spaceship in the middle of the street. And while it wasn't a horror film, the element of fear was important, and Mendonça created a film that leaves viewers feeling on edge for the entirety of the movie. In the future, Mendonça considers making true genre movies. "I go back to me as a viewer," he said. "It’s basically the kind of thing I would like to see."

Image: Universo Produção

Muito Além do Peso

With a bigger economy and a growing middle class, Brazil is facing new public health challenges, including an obesity epidemic. A documentary released in Brazil last month called Way Beyond Weight delves into children's obesity in Brazil, an increasingly worrying issue given that around a third of Brazilian kids are overweight. Some of the themes mirror the same issues in the United States--which has had a longer obesity epidemic--ranging from fast food advertising aimed at kids to children unable to identify basic produce.

The film also reveals other staggering statistics, like the fact that an estimated 56 of Brazilian babies under the age of 1 drink soda. There's even a scene showing a mother bottle-feeding a baby with soda.

It also delves into the growing presence of junk food and fast food companies in Brazil and how they target children. One scene even shows a Nestlé boat arriving in sparsely populated areas of the Amazon; these boats carry tons of cookies to this region. One of the producers noted that while they were filming, he met an indigenous chief who gave tips for making Ramen noodles.

Child obesity in Brazil isn't limited by social class, and the film aims to show children across the socioeconomic spectrum throughout the country. In a few scenes, the movie shows kids unable to identify vegetables.

Brazil's obesity epidemic still hasn't received enough attention domestically, so the film is a good start to put this issue on the policy radar.

To watch more clips from the movie, click here.

Neighboring Sounds

Last month, the Brazilian movie O Som ao Redor, or Neighboring Sounds in English, premiered in the U.S. to rave reviews. Due for release in Brazil in November, the movie is being pegged as a turning point in Brazilian cinema.

 

The New York Times reviewed the movie, making it a critics' pick, and wrote: "The scope of his movie is narrow, but its ambitions are enormous, and it accomplishes nothing less than the illumination of the peculiar state of Brazilian (and not only Brazilian) society."

The Times separately profiled the film's director, Kleber Mendonça FIlho, who said:

“Brazilian film has to break the mold...99 percent of Brazilian filmmakers are middle class or upper middle class or bourgeois, as I am, yet most of the time they’re making films about people they don’t know that much about and subjects they haven’t mastered. We need more films that don’t take place in a favela or the backlands and aren’t about some guy who is really poor and living beneath a bridge. Maybe then we can talk about a new Brazilian aesthetic.”

First, let me say that while I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, it's not perfect. It's slow, and there are occasionally strange moments that defy explanation. That said, it really is a fantastic cross-section of modern Brazilian culture, and a fascinating reflection on how despite being a modern country, in some respects, some things haven't changed at all.

Right off the bat, this movie breaks the mold by taking place outside of the usual suspects for successful Brazilian movies: Rio, São Paulo, and the sertão. It takes place in one of Recife's wealthiest neighborhoods, with the large majority of the movie focusing on scenes on a single street. It's not about gangs, or drug trafficking (aside from two brief scenes involving a resourceful weed dealer), nor a quixotic adventure in the dry backlands. It really focuses on the lives of a number of families living on a block in Recife. As much as I love Rio, it's really refreshing to see a well-done Brazilian movie go somewhere else, especially a city as interesting as Recife.

One of the best things about the movie is the attention to detail and nuances of every day Brazilian life, from the row of shampoo and soap bottles on the window shelf in the shower to the old-fashioned cafeteira for an afternoon coffee to the unsweetened fresh fruit juice at a family meal. This is not Hollywood-ized; what you see in the movie is really a view of how things look. There's also a strange little detail I noticed in which one of the maids is wearing a donated American skiing tee-shirt, which reads "America Downhill" on the back. Subliminal message, perhaps?

The film has a number of really interesting themes. The overarching theme is a deep-seated anxiety about security that pervades the whole movie. Recife is one of the most violent cities in Brazil with high crime rates, and the residents of the block are all, in different ways, terrified by violence. But in the movie, it's the threat of violence that you see, rather than violence itself. It's important because this obsession with security is pervasive in many big cities in Brazil, where armored cars, armed guards, and paranoia are a way of life for some.

The next theme to note is the universal use of technology and consumer culture. Flat screen TVs adorn the characters' apartments while the guards watch videos on their phones; in one scene, a kid uses a laptop to show a video compilation he made of the doorman falling asleep. Characters reveal the need to consume; there's even an odd fight about who bought a bigger new TV. One character blows up when an imported electronic product is ruined.

There's also an interesting dynamic between a rua e a casa (the street and the home), something Brazilian anthropologist Roberto DaMatta has written about. So much of the movie takes place in people's homes or in their yards, so you really get a snapshot of what home life means. Plus, some of the characters you see in their homes are often quite different in the scenes in the street.

Finally, one of the most interesting concepts in the movie is that of class relations and their evolution (or lack thereof) since slavery ended. The relationship the characters have with servants and service workers seem to echo the relationship between slaves and masters, albeit in a modern world. Construction is ubiquitous and massive apartment complexes are taking over the quiet block in the city. Meanwhile, the plantation house in the nearby countyside that belongs to the local coronel is crumbling, and the small country town the house is in appears to be a relic of another century. But even though the forces of modernity are blazing ahead, can the characters--or Recife, or Brazil, for that matter--escape the past?

Xingu, the Movie

When I first read this review of Cao Hamburger's new movie, Xingu, I kept my expectations low when I went to see the movie at the Tribeca Film Festival. While the film certainly has its faults, it's actually a really fascinating true story with the Fernando Meirelles touch and beautiful cinematography.

 

The movie follows the three Villas Boas brothers from a prominent São Paulo family who join an expedition to open Brazil's wild frontier. They encounter indigenous tribes who previously had no outside contact, and become advocates for protecting these groups. Orlando Villas Boas eventually helped convince the Brazilian government to set up Brazil's first indigenous reserve, Xingu National Park, which is nearly the size of Belgium. The brothers also helped convince indigenous tribes to settle in the park and to relocate people who were scattered from tribes and other tribes who would be displaced by the Transamazonica highway construction. It's an incredible story not only about Brazilian history but also about Brazilian-style advocacy. Though it's not about the environment, it does have an underlying message about sustainability and protecting land, which comes at an apt time with the passage of Brazil's Forest Code law by Congress (President Dilma must now decide whether or not to veto it, or make changes and pass it).

I also thought it was interesting to see which companies helped support the movie. Any time you sit through the opening credits of a Brazilian movie, you'll notice that there are quite a few sponsors, and Petrobras, Brazil's oil company, is very frequently one of the top sponsors. But it was noticeably absent from this movie; instead, Eletrobras (Brazil's electric company) and Natura, an environmentally-conscious cosmetics company, were both big sponsors. Other sponsors included Brazil's development bank, Ambev, one of the largest brewing companies in the world, and NET, a cable and internet provider. Just food for thought.

One of the things I did think was missing was more about the relationships with the indigenous tribes on first contact. While it was interesting to see how they would meet the tribes, there was a missed opportunity to show more of how the brothers and the indigenous people adapted to one another during the first year of contact, beyond learning basic vocabulary. There is a fun scene where one of the brothers takes some members of the tribe in a small airplane, but there must be so many fascinating stories surrounding the relationship between the outsiders and the indigenous people. Though the brothers are among the most famous for being advocates for and friends of the indigenous tribes, the picture the movie painted made it seem like everything was quite rosy, while I imagine that this was not always the case in the brothers' relationships with different tribes.

Still, it's definitely a movie worth seeing. Sadly, the movie isn't doing very well in Brazil, where it is currently playing; one columnist says it's because movies about the indigenous don't have much appeal there. But I recommend seeing it if you get a chance, either in Brazil or at future international screenings.

Dzi Croquettes

Two Brazilian movies are playing in New York this month so they can qualify for the Oscars: Elite Squad 2 and Dzi Croquettes. Elite Squad will try to make the short list for best foreign film, and Dzi Croquettes will try to qualify for best documentary. Since I've already written a great deal about Tropa de Elite, it's time to talk a bit about Dzi Croquettes.

Dzi Croquettes tells the story of a thirteen man Brazilian troupe that performed cabaret in Brazil and Europe, achieving huge success doing avant garde and at the time, risqué performances. Liza Minnelli, who appears in the film, became something of a godmother to the troupe, and celebrities came to their shows in Paris and Brazil.

 

The movie is wonderful to watch because it's a story of incredible characters, who are loveable, crazy, and inspiring. It's also interesting from a cultural perspective, to see how a blending of cultural influences, styles, and techniques from Brazil and the U.S. came together to create a completely new phenomenon. Lennie Dale was a fascinating character alone. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, he was a Broadway performer who moved to Brazil and began singing and dancing there, and befriended and even performed with people like Elis Regina. (He also spoke beautiful Portuguese.) He founded Dzi Croquettes along with Brazilian performer Wagner Ribeiro, bringing to the group formal dance technique. While in Brazil, he spent a year in jail after getting caught with pot, and became a hit behind bars teaching the inmates to dance. He also got hit by a bus (literally) and was unable to perform for a time. Along with several others in the troupe, he was a fantastic dancer, making the archive footage of the dance scenes some of the best parts of the movie.

From a historical standpoint, it's amazing what the troupe got away with under the military dictatorship, somehow miraculously avoiding censorship, though the government tried to shut them down a few times. It's also incredible how they were able to express themselves so freely - both as performers and as gay men during the 1960s.

The movie also shows how the group had an enormous cultural influence, not only in dance, theater, and music, but even the Portuguese language (the word tiete, which is now in the Portuguese dictionary, was coined by the group.) Also, many of the foreigners interviewed in the movie became fans of Brazil, traveling there and even learning Portuguese, because of Dzi Croquettes.

Dzi Croquettes is playing at the IFC Center in New York starting today and running through November 24.

Sergio Documentary

Though it came out last year, I can't recommend this documentary enough, which recently aired on the BBC and came to HBO Go this summer. Sergio is a fantastic film that follows the life of Brazilian superstar diplomat Sérgio Vieira De Mello and his untimely death in Iraq. Described as a mix between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy, Sergio was a Carioca who grew up in Europe and traveled the world after joining the UN at age 21. The film alternates between the terrible day of his death and telling the story of his life and career. Though there's just a bit about Brazil and Sérgio's family, a lot of the movie deals with Sérgio's Brazilian diplomatic style. He was a diplomat in the line of Lula's foreign policy, that of engaging any and all leaders in the name of peace, including dictators and accused human rights violators. But what is really fascinating to see is how Sérgio's charisma and powerful personality captivated and influenced people around the world, from Condoleezza Rice to members of the Khmer Rouge. On the other hand, it's maddening and horrific to witness the attack on the UN that ultimately claimed his life. All in all, it's a really amazing story about an amazing Brazilian.

 

 

The film was based on a 2008 book by Samantha Power, called Chasing The Flame. Watch her speak about the book and about Sérgio below.

 

The film is available on HBO Go, for sale here, and may be floating around Youtube if you dig.