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 By the time Itamar Franco was elected president of Brazil
in 1992, the country’s film industry had virtually disappeared. A year later, a new
broadcasting and cinema law lent filmmakers a lifeline: firms that decided to invest
in film production were given tax rebates of up to three per cent, and investments
could be recouped at the box office.
The Brazilian film industry at once leapt to life. Only two commercial films were
made in Brazil in 1992. In 1999, there were 33. Subjects have also become more varied,
and locations diversified. New talent has sprung up not just in Rio de Janeiro, but
also São Paolo, the northeast and the south of the country.
A number of new films, such as Tata Amaral’s A Starry Sky, Beto Brant’s Belly Up,
Bruno Barreto’s Four Days in September, Sergio Rezende’s Lamarca and Carla Camurati’s
Carlota Joaquina, have addressed violence and the country’s military dictatorships,
while the sertão, or semi-arid northeast of Brazil—which won renown in the
classic Brazilian cinema of the 1960s through movies such as Nelson Pereira dos Santos’
Barren Lives and Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil—has been revived as a backdrop.
“You can see in these new films the link between the new wave and television melodrama,
which grew in the 1970s and 1980s during a huge surge in production,” says critic
José Carlos Avellar. Walter Salles’ film Central Station, which won the Golden
Bear prize at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival, illustrates precisely this connection
through the story of a boy looking for his father in the sertão with the help
of a female teacher.
But economic crisis threatens this surge of creativity. “My new film didn’t get a
cent under the 1993 law,” says Salles, currently shooting in the sertão a
Brazilian version of Albanian writer Ismail Kadare’s novel Broken April.
“The 1993 law has shown itself to be shaky and inadequate,” says Paulo Caldas, who
has just made a documentary about city life, The Little Prince’s Rap against the
Wicked Souls. Over its first five years, $184 million went on film production via
the law and only $12.5 million on distribution and marketing—a tiny sum in a market
dominated by American films.
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