Edifício Master

This ever surprising documentary about the residents of a huge building located at Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro, touches our very souls with the bitter-sweet stories of people (almost) like us. From the old couple always quarrelling about each other's idiosyncrasies to the young woman which sells her body but doesn't loose the girlish sparkles of her eyes, Coutinho takes us by hand on a trip over a very familiar, still astonishingly strange, place. Prepare yourself to laughs and cries.

I became a big fan of Coutinho, great documentaries, this one is amazing, so beautiful and familiar, people like us talking about random subjects inside a cluster of apartments, loneliness, robbery, suicide, dreams, past and future, and how they have passed 20 years I'm imagining and super curious to know how the real characters in this movie are doing... Beautiful, beautiful... Eduardo Coutinho will be missed...

In Copacabana, in a low middle-class twelve floor building called "Master", with two hundred and seventy-six apartments and more than five hundred dwellers, Eduardo Coutinho and his crew have rented an apartment for a month and have interviewed thirty-seven inhabitants.

This documentary may be an interesting sociological study of the heterogeneous people living in a metropolis like Rio de Janeiro, or for a monograph work of students of cinema, but I found it very boring for a commercial DVD. I have never caught the point, the objective of this footage. I do not like reality shows, I have never watched "Big Brother" or any other similar show and therefore I have no interest in the intimacy of the dwellers of that horrible building. "Edifício Master" was awarded as the best documentary of 2002 "Festival de Gramado", but I did not like it. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Edifício Master" ("Master Building")

The main reason I am writing this response is because I read Kevv's response. This piece isn't about the beach of Rio De Janeiro. The title contains Edificio...basically Edifice...Building. The film is about the people of a building. It beautifully explores the lives of common people. There are many reasons to see this film: understand that Copacobana may not be the glittering paradise people imagine it to be, have an insight into people's lives that are different or perhaps similar to yours, and enjoy humanity. I think this is the "Reality TV" Americans should spend a lot more time watching. I met the assistant director for this film, Cristiana Grumbach. She and Coutinho provide a great window of insight into Brazilian life. Though these people are a small representation of the entire population of Copacobana, their lives are rich with humanity.

Imagine it: The Human Network. Reality TV that actually has something to do with reality; that gets to the essence of how people are. Like a music video channel, except instead they show clips of everyday people from a building in Copacabana (or a farm in Kansas, or a kibbutz in Israel), each talking for two or five minutes about what makes them happy and what makes them not - you'd never run out of material; people could even send in their own tapes ("America's Humanest Home Videos"), although this would also give them the freedom to do useless things. There are no useless things here, although some moments are better than others: it was the expansion of the old stereotypes that really got to me - so this is how a hooker with a heart of gold feels about being one; and here's the sort of guy Sinatra sang "My Way" for. It's rather uncinematic, though - I wish they had found a way to edit the material into something denser, perhaps by organising it thematically. And there isn't that sense of the institution as an organism, that Frederick Wiseman would've evoked. Hence I don't know if what you see here is any more worthwhile than chatting to each of the other people in the theatre with you, but when did you last do that? The movie's moderately recommended, the TV channel idea is something you should urge Ted Turner to do.