| |
|
|
San Francisco International Film Festival - Part 2
|
By Lance Belville
May 10, 2010
The San Francisco International Film Festival‘s Founder‘s Directing Award, annually awarded to a master of world cinema, went to Brazil‘s Walter Salles this year (pictured left and below). It places him in the company of the world‘s greatest film directors including previous winners Akira Kurasawa, Robert Bresson and Satyajit Ray.
While the body of Salles' internationally recognized work hardly puts him into such elite company, at least quantity-wise, it would be hard to imagine a man of the cinema with more erudition and warm humanity in his work on screen and off than the well-spoken Salles.
He appeared and accepted his award before an enthusiastic house at the San Francisco award ceremony with unassuming grace. He delivered a few off-the-cuff remarks and, later, fielded questions from the audience with an easy command of a wide range of cultural references that bespoke his deep philosophical commitment to the life of the mind. It was a revealing look into the cinematic credos of an exciting and often challenging filmmaker. The ceremony also included a short montage of his work, a 7-minute short film and the showing of a work-in-progress.
 At the heart of his artistic vision, as he described it to this audience, is his view of life as a journey that all must make toward self-awareness and a place, spiritual and geographic. Politically, he believes that Brazil in the 1990‘s, when he began his directing career, can be seen as a collective journey from the chaotic days of 25 years of military dictatorship. He sees Brazil as a country that is itself on a journey toward social and economic justice for all its citizens.
According to Salles, "Human beings are nomads, leaving a record behind. Look at the cave painting at Lascaux. And the Odyssey, it is a road story."
His preoccupation with people on the move was on display in the rough cut of a work-in-progress documentary about the people and places behind Jack Kerouac‘s road novel, On The Road. Salles had been mulling over the idea for more than a decade with offers to make a feature film version of the novel itself appearing and disappearing over the years. Then, in 2008, he took a film crew and went on the Kerouac road, traveling to the places in the book and along the way interviewing people who knew Kerouac at the time and a few who didn‘t but know and love the book.
Salles speculated that this travel theme that illuminates his life and his films comes from his childhood and adolescence when he, himself was "on the road." His father was a diplomat and he lived in many countries including spending his early adolescence in Paris. "Drifting from latitude to latitude gives me a kind of Rashomon point of view."
Salles relates that at first he hated Paris, but he came to love it, all the while yearning for his return to a permanent place and home in Brazil. It was a search and a yearning that he feels has never left him. And indeed, his best-known films, Central Station and Motorcycle Diaries, were both in a sense "road pictures," about people finding themselves through travel.
The Salles‘ Paris apartment was above a kind of art house cinema and the 12-year-old Walter soon took to sneaking down as often as possible to catch the flicks. So often, in fact, that the manager often let him in without paying. It was probably what turned his imagination and his considerable drive toward the making of films.
The search for place as a key to self-discovery finds an extension Salles‘ conviction that film is collaborative creation, another Salles theme in his award ceremony remarks. Linha de Passe, his 2008 film, which was also shown at the festival, illustrates this strand in the fabric of Salles‘ work. He co-directed it with theatre director Daniela Thomas with whom he has co-directed before. All but one of the crew behind the camera were cinema newcomers, a strategy he has also employed before. And the actors in front of the camera were likewise newcomers, with the exception of Vinícius de Oliveira. He was a newcomer himself twelve years earlier playing Josué, the lost little boy in Central Station.
Salles has often used newcomers. He has a record of being vividly interested in helping to develop the coming generation of cinema artists. But on a more personal note he feels that, "The enthusiasm and daring of newcomers is almost as good as experience." He is willing to gamble his own vast experience and resources on the drive and enthusiasm of his newcomers. On a more personal note, he said that he and co-director Thomas filming Linha de Passe in 2008 wanted to recapture the excitement of their first film together, the 1995 Foreign Land, when they themselves were excited newcomers. The gamble paid off for Salles and his youthful collaborators at the Cannes Film Festival. Although an experienced stage actress, film first timer Sandra Corvelon, playing the mother of the four struggling brothers in Linha de Passe, won Best Actress honors and Salles and Thomas were nominated for the Palme d‘Or.
Linha de Passe is also playing in this film festival, although it is a two-year-old film and the festival usually features more recent output. Salles described this picture, too, as a kind of road film. It is the story of a family of four half brothers and their hard-working mother, Cleuza. All are struggling together to find themselves and their place in the São Paulo megalopolis.
 Although the story takes place within the confines of the family‘s tiny favela home and the streets and apartments of São Paulo, it is very much the road picture that Salles describes it as being. All move forward toward a destiny for which they dream, sweat and steal. One of the brothers is a motorcycle delivery boy, a dangerous job that is wheels on pavement, literally as well as symbolically as fast and dangerous as the lives being lived around him.
Another brother works in a gas station and literally services the cars that are passing along the streets of the city. This brother‘s own traveling is spiritual as he struggles to find and hold his fundamentalist Christian faith.
The Vinícius de Oliveira character is that of a talented young soccer player desperately trying to run, kick and bribe his way into the professional ranks. His journey is across the turf of soccer fields until frustration sends him out into the streets and into the apartment of drug-taking middle class Paulistas.
The youngest of the four brothers, a dark-skinned twelve-year-old, searches for his father whom he never saw but knows was dark skinned and drove a bus. The kid rides buses through the city at all hours of the day and night, studying the darkest drivers hoping to discover his long-lost daddy. He ends by taking an empty bus himself and driving it toward his own future.
The picture ends with the now-jobless filling station attendant brother, bereft of faith and employment, nevertheless striding his way toward his uncertain future and the future of his siblings proclaiming, "Walk! Walk! Walk!"
The traveling theme is darker and more intense in Linha de Passe than in either Central Station or Diaries. Its strongest moments are as moving and often more disturbing than anything in Salles‘ two previous films.
Salles‘ willingness to share his time and resources extends to producing emerging Latin American directing talent. He produced Karim Ainouz‘s first feature, Madam Satã, about Rio‘s Lapa celebrated transvestite prostitute and was one of the producers on Fernando Meirelles‘ international blockbuster, City of God, both in the same year, 2002!
The award ceremony opened with a 7-minute Salles short celebrating an interest in film, seen through the eyes of Salles (approximately!) 8-month old baby.
In recent years Brazil has regained its respected place in world cinema. Walter Salles is one of the important talents that helped bring this about.
Previous articles by Lance:
San Francisco Film Festival Features Six Brazilian films - Part 1
From the Birds to Fair Trade Certified Producers' Brew, Brazil's Best Coffee Gains Acclaim
They‘ve Got An Awful Lot of Coffee In Brazil - And It's Going Fair Trade!
Brazil: Then And Now Rondonia
Brazil: Nova Jerusalem's Passion Play
Brazil: Up a Piece of Mountain to See a Batch of Theatre
Brazil: Mossoró's Biggest Play on Earth Heads for Guinness Book of World Records
Brazil: House of Sand Impresses at San Francisco International Film Festival
Brazil: Lower City Helps Kick Off San Francisco International Film Festival
Brazil‘s Kayapó Tribe
San Francisco International Film Festival: ALMOST BROTHERS Adds More Fans To Its List of International Devotees
San Francisco International Film Festival: Nelson Friere Documentary Enchants Audiences
San Francisco International Film Festival: Three Brazilian Films
|
5/10/2010
|
|
