Black Brazilian Cinema

“When everything is really bright, we can see everything; but when everything is dark we have possibilities.”—Diego PaulinoThis dossier was born out of a series of conversations that took place over the course of a month as part of an event on Black Brazilian cinema held at the University of California, Irvine, in the spring of 2022, organized by ourselves and the translator Natalia Affonso. We invited six young Black Brazilian filmmakers whose works have made an impact on the landscape of Brazilian cinema within the past decade to share insights with us in informal conversations after the screenings of their films. The filmmakers were André Novais Oliveira, director of Temporada (Long Way Home, 2018); Grace Passô, director of República (Republic, 2021) and an actor in Temporada; Diego Paulino, director of Negrum3 (Blackn3Ss, 2018); Yuri Costa, director of Egum (2020); Naira Évine Soares, director of O Dia Que Resolvi Voar (The Day I Decided to Fly, 2019); and Glenda Nicácio, co-director of Café com Canela (Coffee with Cinnamon, 2017). The series as a whole kicked off with an introduction to the roots of Afro-Brazilian cinema through a talk by Brazilian film scholar Kênia Freitas, followed by the screening of two landmark works in the history of Black Brazilian filmmaking: Zózimo Bulbul’s Alma no Olho (Soul in the Eye, 1973) and Raquel Gerber’s Ôrí: a reconstrução da identidade negra no Brasil (The Reconstruction of Black Identity in Brazil, 1989).The event was still deeply marked by the pandemic, in both its limitations and what it made possible. Our screenings were hybrid, and we presented at the awkward joint between a sparsely populated theater and a much larger invisible online audience. Technological mishaps forced us to reschedule one of our screenings, but joy and connection were palpable in the conversations we held via Zoom with the directors in Brazil. The pandemic also surfaced as a topic of the conversations. Those in Brazil were still experiencing the last year of the traumatic presidency of COVID denialist Jair Bolsonaro, whose necropolitical government grew more violent during the pandemic, and was particularly lethal for Black and Indigenous populations. This dossier is a document of those hard times and of the potentiality of being together and making community, which, as the conversations here reveal, is at the core of the ethics and poetics of Black Brazilian filmmaking.As the dossier’s closing essay by Freitas emphasizes (and we should clarify that this is a new text, not the historical introduction she presented for the series), the flourishing and effervescence of what is being called Black Brazilian cinema involves questioning what it would mean for a film to be classified as such. Freitas suggests a definition that refuses the strict or narrow assessments based exclusively on a restricted notion of Black characters or Black themes. Above all, she argues for the rejection of the association of Blackness with violence and an insistence on the capacity, the necessity, and, above all, the right to make films about any topic. As Janaína Oliveira asserted in the roundtable “Towards a Quilombo Cinema: An Afro-Feminist Roundtable,” organized by the journal Another Gaze, “[B]eing Black can mean anything, has endless expressions.”1A recurring theme in the films we screened and the conversations that followed (and are featured in this dossier) was therefore precisely the desire—associated with Afrofuturism and fabulation—to move beyond conventions of realism. Speaking about her film Café com Canela, Nicácio noted that not only was it rare to see Black experiences represented in film in Brazil but also that it was “rare to have a film centered on Black life that doesn’t speak of misery and violence, the stereotypes of what it is to be a Black Brazilian in Brazil.” As Paulino emphasized, “Our lives are not reducible to the suffering that we see in the news every day. So, in this process, I wanted to represent our experiences in another register, something beyond realism.” Naira Évine Soares added that “what we have been doing here, within the context of Black Brazilian cinema, is precisely to weave memories, to write the memories that exist or those that might even be fictions—since all memories, at the end of the day, are fictions.” Realism—and its associations with a documentary register, with the news—would seem to confirm a settled reality and its norms of legibility and transparency, closing down the possibilities of imagining alternative temporalities and spaces. Realism is also how Blackness has been historically inscribed in film, at least since the political avant-garde of cinema novo in the 1960s—a movement led by white middle-class men—as the indexical sign for Brazilian social reality.In other words, in the history of white hegemonic Brazilian cinema, Blackness has stood as the opposite of imagination. Hence the insistence on affirming opacity as a potentiality for fabulation, as in Paulino’s quote that opens this introduction: “when everything is dark we have possibilities.” In the conversation, Costa echoed this same approach: “if we believe that everything is in the realm of light—that there is no opacity—then there remains nothing that is not already controlled, there is no room for us to create new ways of existing, to create new ways of being in the world.” The palpable relief in Grace Passô’s short República, when the main character is told that Brazil has only ever been a dream, speaks to such a need for opacity, because it opens the possibility of imagining otherwise. In their practice and their theorization, these filmmakers thus respond to the call posed, decades earlier, by Martinican thinker and poet Édouard Glissant (who was evoked by Costa), defending the “right to opacity” as a refusal of Western colonial protocols of transparent legibility.2 Glenda Nicácio connected this opacity with Oxum, the Afro-Brazilian religious deity of the fresh waters, “an orixá that is so vast” that it occupies “the place of non-representation,” reminding us that, even in film, “there are things that should not be shown.” The ethical call thus locates the aesthetic practice and theorization of the filmmakers here in a global dialogue with other Afro-diasporic experiences, while always modulated by the very concrete particularities of the violence of the Brazilian national project.Evoking the robust historical presence of maroon communities called quilombos in Brazil, this cinema is also sometimes called quilombo cinema. This cinema carries forward the project of carving out an alternative space and time, marking but also founding a territory within that is also an elsewhere: new ways of being in the world.3 The Black feminist thinker Beatriz Nascimento, whose words are the structuring spine of Gerber’s film Ôri, described the practice of making quilombo—or, aquilombamento—as a vital form of Black resistance in which by “[o]ccupying space with their physical body (existential territory), they [Afro-Brazilians] can seize hold of the city, reproducing the means of ancient quilombolas [historical quilombo dwellers].”4 In their practice, these filmmakers use cinema to create quilombos. Paulino imagines a circuit whereby an imagined future remembers present dreams, precisely as a quilombo practice of seizing the territoriality and temporality of the city of São Paulo. As he asserted, this new generation of Black Brazilian filmmakers elaborate aesthetic practices that deal with “how to demarcate this time and place and how to create these new images for a future four or five hundred years from now, where it will be impossible to deny that we were here for a while, dreaming and creating memories. Times might change, but the memory will have lasted.”Another aspect of aquilombamento appears in the theme that was mentioned many times in our conversations, namely the importance of filmmaking as a process of making community. The importance of processuality emerges from what Nicácio described as a sense of having to create in a context in which there is no universal textbook that can be used and where the path is inscribed through the walking: “We have to start everything from scratch here. So the production processes are valuable, in the sense of understanding that the production process is also a creative process, a place of discovery and invention that is set in motion by life itself.” Being attuned to the process rather than the product means understanding the practice of filmmaking as a form of sharing time, wherein the materiality of what the filmmakers call território [the lived space] and the relation among the people involved are deeply inscribed in the aesthetic shaping of the film. As Yuri Costa put it, “I’m more interested in the path and in the people, in the connections, in the exchanges we make as we walk the path together.” Paulino described this practice as “people moving together as a cardume [school of fish],” which for Novais Oliveira parallels the process of building an artistic family. The very act of filmmaking becomes an opportunity for creating a community of practice based on deep affective bonds—another aspect of what it means to make cinema as a practice of quilombo.Filmmaking thus becomes placemaking, which emerges also as the mundane becomes another form of escaping transparent realism. This includes a camera that seeps deep into the enchantment of everyday rhythms and minutiae of a different kind of periphery rarely seen in Brazilian cinema, like the city of Contagem, in Novais Oliveira’s films, or the Recôncavo Baiano, in Nicácio and Ary Rosa’s work. It is about “showing things in their own time,” as Novais Oliveira said, speaking of the temporality of his montage and the care in his attention to the small ordinary things, gesturing to an enchantment that lies beyond the visible realm of the frame. Re-enchanting ordinary everyday life also pushes back against the media legibility protocol that frames Black lives as an unchanging spectacle of suffering.Although the notion of a quilombo cinema is premised on an alternative ethics of filmmaking, it also stems from the precariousness still faced by many Black filmmakers and artists in Brazil. As Passô noted, despite the increasing number of Black filmmakers in Brazil—largely due to the implementation of affirmative action in universities and state investments in the expansion of the infrastructure of film training, production, distribution, and exhibition—there is still a deep inequality in funding for Black productions. As Nicácio stressed, this inequality affects the very meaning of the labor of making films. The independent Black filmmaker enjoys no privileges of “just” shooting, having to be engaged in all stages of a film: from writing and fundraising to post-production and distribution. In recent data released by the Agência Nacional do Cinema (ANCINE), in 2021, only 4.9 percent of registered film directors in Brazil self-declared Black, while 92.8 percent were self-declared white.5 Historically excluded from the mainstream system of cinema, although the situation has improved, there is still a long arduous path to walk.Echoing the exchanges made possible by these conversations, we offer the present special dossier as a part in this larger practice of making memory, sharing time, and creating an archive of thought and resistance that will surely be valuable for the times to come.