from brazil with love – 21. UNDER|DOX 08

Our Artist in Focus Bernardo Zanotta is also linked to our country focus From Brazil with Love. We have taken the title from a film by the American avant-garde legend Vivian Ostrovsky, who lived in Brazil for many years. Both are united by their queer filmmaking and their use of the medium of film as an archive and a form of remembrance; both are cosmopolitans of cinema. Bernardo Zanotta grew up in Brazil and went to Amsterdam to study film. Vivian Ostrovsky, born in New York, also grew up in Brazil and studied in Paris. Both express themselves through experimental forms of cinema and, through them, arrive at a deeper form of visual truth – one that lies hidden in the vague interstices of montage and the blurriness of overlapping or out-of-focus images.

Artist in Focus: Bernardo Zanotta

Bernardo Zanotta (*1996, Porto Alegre, Brasilien) works primarily with analogue film and video formats. In 2014, he moved to Amsterdam to study at the Moving Image Department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. HEART OF HUNGER (2018) was awarded the Pardino d’Argento at the Locarno Film Festival. Zanotta is actively involved in the underground cinema scene and the queer diaspora. His films have been screened at venues including the British Film Institute, the EYE Film Museum, FID Marseille, BAFICI, Rotterdam and Pesaro.

Insieme insieme

During their permanent vacation in the Italian lake region, a mysterious trio takes captive an innocent tourist.
“Young Brazilian director Bernardo Zanotta appears to have made a queer farce, with the right amount of pace and joy, a film that owes much to the sheer delight in manufacturing cinematic images: frame, colours, motifs, bodies. Actors and actresses Lydia Giordano, Gustavo Jahn and Jun Ortega make up a wandering trio in the recesses of cinephile and literary memory.“ (FID Marseille)

The Cannibal Trilogy – The common roots of cannibalism and queerness

Heart of Hunger – part 1
A tribute to the body and an episodic tale of the unspeakable; two friends play games that are both sensual and sadistic. They lose each other, they find each other again – the heart is a lonely hunter.

In His Bold Gaze – part 2
The life of Armin Meiwes, a computer technician from Rotenburg, who ate the Berlin engineer Bernd Brandes in 2001. Drawing on methods such as documentary theatre and archival research, the film reconstructs this notorious case and links it to the video culture of the late 1990s.

Wild Fruits – part 3 
An experimental costume drama based on Michel de Montaigne’s essay ‘On the Cannibals’ (1580). Against the backdrop of French colonial expansion and the Wars of Religion, the fictional poet Jean Aurand travels to Brazil as part of a group of Huguenots. On an island, he witnesses the violent colonisation.

Tragédia

At the age of 13, Bernardo Zanotta is given a video camera and films his family whilst on holiday. Together with his stepmother, he hatches a plot to murder his father, who neglects them both. A fictional documentary-style found-footage story that tells of a budding love of cinema.

Quintal

A tribute to the short film Pátio by Glauber Rocha (1959), which paved the way for Cinema Novo and was enthusiastically embraced by the Tropicalismo movement.

BR 2016 | 9 min | 16mm | German Premiere
D+B: Bernardo Zanotta | | With Leandro Lefa, Camila Rosa

Vivian Ostrosvky | from brazil with love

Vivian Ostrovsky *1945, New York City. She grew up in Brazil. She studied film at the Sorbonne in Paris under Erich Rohmer and at the Cinémathèque française under Henri Langlois. Ostrovsky’s work features striking hybrid forms of experimental genres such as found-footage collages, essay films and diaries. In the mid-1970s, she founded the distribution platform Ciné-Femmes International, at the height of the male-dominated Nouvelle Vague, to raise the profile of films made by women.

Elizabeth Bishop: From Brazil with Love

“In 1951, the American poet Elizabeth Bishop set off for Brazil, seeking refuge from writer’s block and depression. For 15 years, Bishop lived with (the architect) Soares in the ‘Lota House’, where she wrote the majority of her poetry collection Question of Travel (1965). Among these is ‘Song for the Rainy Season’, a topographical (love) poem that describes the intertwining of home and nature through sensory imagery.“ (Esther Buss)