Metalworkers (Peões)
Directed by Eduardo Coutinho
Brazil, 2004. 84 minutes.
Screening at the MOMA Premiere Brazil film festival.
Metalworkers is a complex portrait of the dynamic labor movement in Brazil that helped
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva come to power. Featuring numerous interviews from the former labor leaders that spearheaded Lula’s Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores), the film documents a prolonged struggle against foreign automobile giants.
Protesting during a military dictatorship during the late 1970s was fraught with risks. Some party members were fired while a select few rose to prominence. The marchers at
the 100,000 strong rallies risked everything to demand better working conditions, and their efforts left an imprint on the country that continues to influence Brazil today.
Read the full review here.
Photo courtesy of Eduardo Coutinho / Museum of Modern Art.
Should Nothing Else Work Out
(Se nada mais der certo)
Directed by José Eduardo Belmonte.
Written by Belmonte, Luis Carlos Pacca.
With Cauã Reymond, Caroline Abras, João Miguel.
Brazil, 2009. 120 minutes.
Screening at the MOMA Premiere Brazil film festival.
Should Nothing Else Work Out is a languorous work about optimism in people who have every reason to give up hope. Set in São Paulo, the movie depicts the intertwining lives of three characters on the brink of penury. They each long for the warm embrace of middle class life as they plunge deeper and deeper into poverty. Leo is a handsome, poorly paid journalist who has recently lost his money in a tax scam. Marcin is a teenage happy-go-lucky coke dealer and huckster. And Wilson is a morose taxi driver who totes around the pistol with which his father committed suicide.
Their various get-rich-quick schemes haven’t worked out, nor does it appear they will anytime soon. Leo’s girlfriend is addicted to coke, Marcin’s hook-up thinks she’s too flashy to keep dealing, and Wilson is in danger of losing his taxi cab. Yet somehow they believe that things will get better.
Read the full review here.
Scholars and champions of the freedom to write gained an important victory this week in New York.
The 2d Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned a lower court decision that had prevented the Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan from entering the country. Ramadan, an outspoken critic of both fundamentalism and American intervention alike, was excluded in 2004 on ideological grounds after having been offered a tenured position at Notre Dame. The government later discovered that Ramadan had donated about $1200 to a group that funded Hamas, a listed terrorist group.
The appeals court held that Ramadan was entitled to explain his association with the alleged terrorist group, and had been denied such an opportunity at the consulate. He was not granted a visa. The freedom of speech has now been extended to apply at consular proceedings. A lower court will now reexamine Ramadan’s case.
Ramadan is an elusive, controversial figure whose complex opinions can be interpreted in a variety of ways.
–Deji Olukotun
Read the PEN American Center’s press release here.
Read my earlier post about Ramadan here.
Visit a profile of Tariq Ramadan by human rights Professor Ian Baruma here.
Read a statement by Tariq Ramadan about his views about Islam and anti-semitism, among other issues (in French): here.
Laika
Written and Illustrated by Nick Abadzis
First Second Books, 2007. 208 pages.
ISBN 13: 978-1-59643-101-0
As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, it may be easy to forget a different 40th anniversary that occurred decades before. That anniversary marked the Russian Revolution, and the Soviet Union decided to commemorate its founding by lobbing the first living creature into space. Her name was Laika – and she was a dog.
America was already in shock after the unexpected launch of the satellite Sputnik in 1957. The launching of Laika into space just one month later seemed to confirm fears of Soviet technical superiority.
Nick Abadzis’ graphic novel Laika imaginatively retells this strange episode of the Space Race. Based upon meticulous research into space agency archives, the story follows the dog Laika from her birth to a difficult life as a stray, and eventually her untimely arrival at a space agency laboratory. Kind, empathetic, and always playful, Laika quickly wins the hearts of her caretaker Comrade Dubrovsky and the entire lab.
But as charming as the cute dog may be, she has been drawn into the center of the Cold War, and becomes a tool of the state. Laika has been given a higher calling. We watch her proceed through rigorous pre-flight testing and, eventually, stare up at the steaming engines of a giant rocket.
Read the full review here.
Cinderellas, Wolves, and Prince Charming
(Cinderelas, lobos e um príncipe encantado)
Written and Directed by Joel Zito Araújo
Brazil, 2008. 106 minutes.
Screening at the MOMA Premiere Brazil film festival.
Joel Zito Araújo’s Cinderellas, Wolves, and Prince Charming is a quirky, meandering documentary film that reveals the underbelly of the cross-border sex trade of Brazil. Over 900,000 women a year enter the sex trade each year, joining an estimated 20 million modern day slaves. Lured by promises of romantic marriages to wealthy Europeans, they board planes and are quickly ensnared within violent organized crime rings.
However, the exploiters of the sex trade are not always sinister Mafiosos. They are just as frequently boring middle-aged European males who travel to the country for sex. Some prey upon minors, while others seek a few weeks of unbridled companionship with prostitutes. Through numerous interviews with sex workers and sexual tourists alike, Cinderellas exposes the pernicious stereotypes which perpetuate the trade in a country suffering from poverty. The battle to end the sex trade will not just begin with stopping the traffickers, it will also entail debunking age-old myths of the exotic.
Read the full review here.
