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by :Ela Bittencourt
07-11-2018
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Cinemas of Underdevelopment: Djibril Diop Mambéty

Djibril Diop Mambéty included children in all his films, yet his work is exquisitely, brazenly adult. Since I saw the Mambéty retrospective at the Olhar de Cinema International Film Festival in Curitiba, Brazil, the context that immediately imposed itself was...

by :Ela Bittencourt
06-26-2018
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Arábia: Brazilian Cinema at the Dusk of Lula

Over three years ago, when I had just arrived in Brazil, I asked a family friend who’s a journalist why São Paulo's conservative papers were in such an uproar over Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula wasn’t president. Did the...

Alina Rudnitskaya documents Russia in Blood

by :Ela Bittencourt
06-22-2018
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Through the Glass Darkly: Alina Rudnitskaya Documents Russia

Russian filmmaker Alina Rudnitskaya's Bitch Factory (2009) is one of the fiercest documentaries I’ve seen this year. I wouldn’t stop at calling it feminist. Given its straightforward observational approach, you wouldn’t think it’d land so strong. It starts out with a...

by :Ela Bittencourt
06-21-2018
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María Luisa Bemberg’s I, The Worst of All

A radical costume drama is a rare thing, as the (mostly) warranted paeans for Lucrecia Martel’s Zama show. Even if the filmmaker chooses to disregard faithfulness to historical facts, or decides that the only way to be faithful is to...

Ismael Caneppele's Music For When the Lights Go Out

by :Ela Bittencourt
06-18-2018
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LGBTQ Brazil Films – New York Summer

Cinema Tropical, New York's top organization dedicated to promoting Latin American cinema, has announced Verão in New York summer program of Brazilian films, including LGBTQ Brazil, curated by Ela Bittencourt: "On July 28 and 29, Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI)...

by :Ela Bittencourt
06-1-2018
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Animal Killers: Ecology, Feminism and Horror in Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor

Agnieszka Holland and Kasia Adamik’s Silver Bear winning feature, Spoor (2017)—an adaptation of the novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Polish novelist and Booker Prize winner, Olga Tokarczuk—doesn’t strictly follow a single genre. Part crime...

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