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As São Paulo State and Brazil at large gears up its funding for film, TV, vid games and beyond, there is a distinct possibility that Brazil’s Congress will approve this year a global streamer investment quota for Brazilian films and series. If that happens, it could see R$700 million-r$800 million ($122 million-$140 million) being invested in independent Brazilian production, producer Fabiano Gullane (“Senna”) estimates.

Already Brazil is Latin America’s comeback story and its players, thanks to “I’m Still Here” and “Senna” walk the world stage. Following, the often remarkable São Paulo companies known to be at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, often aided in their attendance by São Paulo State. As often frequent international co-producers, they are well worth knowing. A drill-down on companies at Berlin, with some more to come.

44 Toons, Ale McHaddo

An animation studio and, from 2016, live action producer behind toon series “Osmar” and Netflix...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAnna May Wong in Piccadilly.Trailblazing film star Anna May Wong will be the first Asian American to appear on US currency. Wong, whose legacy is overviewed in this Guardian article by Pamela Hutchinson, will be the face of more than 300 million quarters.Alice Diop has won the Prix Jean Vigo, an award given to a French director each year since 1951, for her first fiction feature Saint Omer. Earlier this year, the film won won two awards at the Venice Film Festival and was selected as the French entry for Best International Film at the 2023 Oscars.Paweł Pawlikowski’s next feature—tentatively titled The Island—will be led by Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara. Per Variety, they play an American couple who “turn their backs on civilization to build a secluded paradise,” until a...

Carlos Reichenbach‘s The Forbidden Paradise Carlos Reichenbach, a Brazilian filmmaker and cinematographer perhaps best known for his sex comedies and dramas of the ’70s and early ’80s, died of heart failure yesterday, June 14, while being rushed to a São Paulo hospital. Yesterday was also the day Reichenbach turned 67. A heavy smoker, he had already suffered several heart attacks and had been hospitalized for respiratory ailments. Born in Porto Alegre, in Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, Reichenbach grew up in São Paulo. In 1965, while still in college, he shot (the now-lost) Via Sacra, an underground romp featuring full-frontal nudity, gay and [...]...

The Aesthetics of Garbage, Part 1 can be found here.

Above: O insigne ficante (The Inisg Nificant, 1980).

“Make films to occupy run down, low class theatres and be subsequently forgotten” —Rogério  Sganzerla

One of the quintessential traits of Cinema Novo was the firm rejection of anything Hollywood; films like The Red Light Bandit and O pornógrafo (The Ponographer, 1970) by João Callegaro on the contrary, eagerly cannibalized popular American culture. Cultural appropriation is manifest throughout Callegaro's film, which openly references noir flicks whose aesthetic codes and conventions are borrowed and subverted by the director. While retaining an unmistakable Brazilian flavour these films openly boast their spoofy hybridism, combining high and low culture at a time when the term post-modernism had yet to be coined. True inheritors of Oswald De Andrade’s Anthropophagic Manifesto, these were metropolitan indians suffocated by the orthodox traditionalism of the left on one side and by an increasingly oppressive regime on the other.

Hot off the virtual presses: "In the Signals section's theme program The Mouth of Garbage: Sub Culture and Sex in São Paulo, the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Iffr) will present a vast panorama of features and shorts from São Paulo's so-called 'Boca do Lixo' (Mouth of Garbage), the nickname for the working class neighborhood in the center of the Brazilian metropolis. These quick and dirty productions frequently highlighted the sleazy underbelly of Brazilian society using established genres such as noir, horror, the western, and pornography."

So far, the lineup ranges from Ozualdo Candeias's The Margin (1967) through Jean Garret's Fuk Fuk Brazilian Style (1986) and includes work from the years in between by João Callegaro, João S Trevisan, Jairo Ferreira, Carlos Reichenbach, Ody Fraga and Cláudio Cunha, whose Oh! Rebuceteio (1984) Fernando F Croce reviewed some time back: "A sort of mix of Bob Fosse and Wilhelm Reich, Cunha...