BELAIR - Brazilian 70s Underground Cinema Doc!

Join us to discover the fasciating story of BELAIR, with a very rare screening of the documentary exploring the countercultural film production company whose daringly experimental 1970s films flew in the face Brazil's dictatorial military regime!

As Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement transitioned to a more audacious, tropicalist approach in the late 60s in response to the increasing violence of Brazil’s Military Dictatorship (over a thousand tortured in 1969 alone), a new strand of filmmaking surfaced from the margins of the industry. Proudly named Cinema Marginal (literally Marginal Cinema), the movement derived its self-deprecating sobriquet from a 1968 artwork by contemporary Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica: A red flag depicts the figure of a prostrate body, arms outstretched, with bold text printed beneath it that reads: “Seja Maginal, Seja Heroi” (“Be Marginal, Be a Hero”). The dead body belongs to Manoel Moreira, or Cara de Cavalo (“Horse Face”), who was murdered by a clandestine police unit in retaliation for shooting a detective working for Dictator Getulio Vargas. Like many dissidents during this era of repression, the band of filmmakers who formed Cinema Marginal considered this artwork a rallying cry for combating the militarized conservatism dominating Brazil. After all, the phrase “Marginal” was also a euphemism for outlaw.

By 1970, three Cinema Marginal players united to form a new creative consortium. They named it, tongue firmly planted on cheek, Belair, evoking both the impossibly distant realities of Hollywood glamour as well as the name of a social housing building in Botafogo (Rio de Janeiro). Belair produced seven films in five months, all of them, directed by founders Julio Bressane or Rogerio Sganzerla (whose 1968 surprise smash The Red-Light Bandit was Brazil’s answer to Breathless) and starring the magnetic Helena Ignez. But as police authorities closed in on Bressane and Sganzerla, accusing them of making films with terrorist funding to undermine the dictatorship, the pair shuttered Belair and fled to Europe. Their wildly imaginative, defiantly immediate works of contraband cinema – baring such remarkable titles as Copacana Mon Amour and Baron Olavo, The Horrible – went largely unseen. That is until the 21st century when Bressane’s daughter, Noa, and filmmaker Bruno Safadi approached the director to revisit them (Sganzerla died in 2005) and recount for once the entire story of this ill-fated endeavor, replete with excerpts from the eclectic, experimental films they produced. The resulting documentary, BELAIR (2009), remains undistributed in the United States but we are thrilled to screen it tonight and offer an essential introduction to this largely forgotten body of work by two of cinema’s great outlaws.

Dirs. Bruno Safadi & Noa Bressan, 2009, 80mins, Unrated (Recommended For Adults), Brazil, Portuguese w/ English Subtitles, Digital.

Programmed by Bernardo Rondeau

Special thanks to Bruno Safadi.

Please email [email protected] or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.

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Philosophical Research Society, 3910 Los Feliz Boulevard, Los Angeles, United States