A montage of 48 Brazilian films made between 1898 and 2022. The moments, the frames, where we feel a glimmer, an innovation, some experimentation and emotion coming to us at different times. A fine thread that runs through cinema since its birth, and even before.
For this behemoth, Bressane took his opera omnia and edited it in an order that first adheres to historical chronology but soon starts to move backwards and forward. The various pasts – the 60s, the 80s, the 2000s – comment on each other in a way that sheds light on Bressane’s themes and obsessions, which become increasingly apparent and finally, a whole idea of cinema reveals itself to the curious and patient viewer. Will Bressane, from now on, rework The Long Voyage of the Yellow Bus when he makes another film? Is this his latest beginning? Why not, for the eternally young master maverick seems to embark on a maiden voyage with each and every new film!
Three friends, Hilda, Matilda and Gaspar, meet in a rundown downtown apartment during a weekend to chat, drink and experience pleasure.
A dysfunctional family, composed of a prostitute and two gays, one strong and the other fragile and stupid, lives a routine life in Rio de Janeiro. When the slut threatens the other two to stop supporting them, they decide to find an odalisque as an alternative to keep their easy life.
Bressane (together with his partner Rosa Dias and young filmmaker Rodrigo Lima) guide us through the beautiful Swiss Sils Maria, where Nietzsche spent no less than eight summers. In his letters, Nietzsche indicates which spots brought him to a different understanding of philosophy. He discovered, beyond the philosophical text, a source for ideas in the pure air, in the mountain landscapes, in the water of the lakes, and in the age-old forests.
After receiving a strange picture postcard, Marina knows there’s nothing else to it but to return to Rio de Janeiro, the beautiful city that here seems threatening and almost enchanting.
The mythological story of the first woman on Earth, who came before Eve. She is created by God to be Adam’s wife. However, Lilith does not accept a position of inferiority in relation to man, she rebels and goes to the desert. Lilith reappears as Eve’s double, eats the forbidden fruit, takes revenge on Adam, on God, and becomes the first woman to rise up against the ruling patriarchal system.
A young couple, Pedro and Antônia, have their relationship weakening after meeting Luana. Romance, seduction, fear and anguish from the future are established in this story of liquid love.
Bressane’s first color film, shot in the home of the artist Elyseu Visconti. Part of it is missing sound and final editing because the director was forced to leave Brazil. Horror and humor to deal with the subject of insanity: “In the end everyone leaves the house as though they were laboratory mice escaping, they invade the city and contaminate the world”. “If we talk about horror, this film deals with national horror, with Mojica Marins as an emblem. There might be a few touches of Corman and English horror, but it is another level of horror. What transformed the film was the location where we were shooting, the house of a 19th century painter, a receptacle of light. When I arrived and saw that house, that light, I said: ‘This is the film. This is the horror’. The meaning of the film, its appeal, derives from this laboratory of light” (J. Bressane). — Torino Film Festival
Sentimental Education centers on the unique relationship between Áurea, a lonely 40 year old teacher, and a young man she has just met by chance – one of these encounters which mythology and literature are full of. A delicate soul who finds itself attracted to a beauty that seems to demand, disturb and move her. That shakes her up entirely. During the days following their first conversation, she will expose all her feelings through classes in which he will let himself be carried away. Until an unusual episode from the past is revealed and changes everything.
“If you had to choose between me and your mother, who would it be?” Capitu asks provocatively of her problematic lover. Elsewhere, they dance to inaudible music with their friends, each couple keeping to a rhythm of their own. At times, this depiction of the memories we see one Dom Casmurro commit to paper with a flamboyant pen seems to be an interplay of conflicting emotions – particularly when jealousy raises its head. Adapted from the Brazilian classic novel 'Dom Casmurro' (1899) by Machado de Assis as an ironic/philosophical essay on poetry and jealousy, and featuring fragments of Bressane’s previous works.
A curious couple, whose existence takes place where art arises along a singular metaphysical desire. They search for it through repeated and varied representations, in a setting of light where hope and desperation blend together.
A delicate and tenacious writer, widowed three years ago, engages in frequent conversations with a parrot. However, she’s always observed by a large portion of raw meat.
The mayor of the city of Rio de Janeiro wants to go down in history. For this purpose, he decides to separate Rio from Brazil and create a new country.
They live, they act, they love. Today they remember, they relive, they live through cinema and life.
In his film Rua Aperana 52 Júlio Bressane describes the invention of a landscape, the topology of a corner of Rio de Janeiro. The film consists of a series of photographs taken between 1909 and 1955 by, among others, Bressane's parents at and around the address used as a title. These are interlarded with scenes from films made between 1957 and 2005, bringing the total fictional time the film covers to almost a century; one hundred years in which the winding road featured in almost every shot structures the new landscape behind the Aperana, which means 'wrong road'. Rua Aperana 52 is autobiographical, as it is a landscape from Bressane's youth, but it is also not so; it is more a multi-subjective mythology of a place seen through all those films and photographs. Bressane refers to his editing as an intuitive form of thinking aimed at evoking moods which make the viewer the new witness of the fictional landscape. A fiction about a fiction,
Two women, long-time friends, embark on a love story. They are writers who do not write to publish but for themselves. Their mutual conversation, their desires, the risks and phantoms of existence, the privilege of the wounded and of condemnation, traverse their speech, are a confession.
Joana D'Arc, a former public school teacher in Rio de Janeiro, tries to recover her home, lost to the City Hall. The trajectory is shared by the pirate fisherman Pharaó, from Guanabara Bay.
Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan, Garoto follows a young couple who find themselves in an enchanted place where they experience an amorous and spiritual adventure.
