Director’s note
In the words of Walter Benjamin, ‘There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on Earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.’
Cinema Novo was a fruitful Brazilian movement, both aesthetically and intellectually. It proposed a revolutionary representation of the country’s reality. Cinema Novo is a critical essay on a generation that created a new way of making films in Brazil. A new attitude of getting out to the streets to be with the Brazilian people, incorporating new forms of language to formulate the aesthetic and cultural issues of Brazil in new grounds. What’s the Brazilian image? What to film? How to film? Reformulated questions, starting from a new political stance, which merged art and revolution.
Cinema Novo created images for Brazil, and from Brazil to the world. The process of making this film is a deep adventure through the creation of a generation who thought about art and cinema as the leading edge, and a complex mirror of Brazilian society. We want to think of Cinema Novo as a spirit of compulsive creation which reveals the struggle of the artist/filmmaker with his/her time. According to my father Glauber Rocha, ‘wherever there is a filmmaker, prepared to stand up against commercialism, exploitation, pornography and the tyranny of technique, there is the living spirit of Cinema Novo. Wherever there is a filmmaker, of any age or background, ready to put his cinema and his profession at the service of the great causes of his time, there will be the living spirit of Cinema Novo.’
This film comes from a meeting between generations, therefore it is not a film about Cinema Novo as a movement, nor does it aim to explain it, but instead to explore it through a melting pot of voices, emotions and poetry. Walter Lima Júnior said ‘There is much knowledge and inspiration to get from the Cinema Novo period. Experiences and glimpses of memories. It is necessary to recover these lost tracks of time and uncompleted attempts, and reanimate them.’ This film emerges from these lines, film fragments, interrupted fragments. In Latin-America we know well about these cycles of interruptions and restarts. That is why it is so important to connect art and politics, bringing culture to the dimension of the political structure of the country and our continent.
To make this film was to remember a generation who experienced the military dictatorship in the flesh, to see Brazilian history interdicted, and the collective dream of a social and cultural revolution broken. I believe that the great passion that moved me while making Cinema Novo was the need and will to think about Brazilian reality, about my people. And, of course, to dream of cinema. Paulo César Sarraceni used to say that he wanted to make a poetic political cinema. I believe it is urgent to create new imaginative, poetical and political filmmaking.
In this sense, the film aims to discuss Cinema Novo as a movement of thought, and memory as a construction of the future, inseparable from a Brazilian and Latin-American collective project.
About the director
Born in Brasilia in 1978, Eryk Rocha grew up living throughout Latin America with his filmmaker parents, Paula Gaitán and Glauber Rocha. Rocha studied at the legendary EICTV Film School in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba, where he shot his first feature Stones in the Sky (Rocha que voa, 2002). An official selection of the Venice, Locarno, Rotterdam and Havana Film Festivals, it won Best Film at the É Tudo Verdade Film Festival in Brazil along with awards in Argentina and Cuba.
In 2004, Eryk Rocha’s first short film, Quimera, played in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Screenings at Sundance, Montreal, Bilbao followed, along with awards in Uruguay and Brazil. His second feature, Clandestine Break (Intervalo clandestino, 2006), won a Special Jury Mention at the Guadalajara Film Festival. He followed it with Pachamama (2010), which travelled to more than 20 festivals and received the title of Best Film at the Cineport Film Festival.
His first fiction film, Passerby (Transeunte, 2011) was invited to Telluride, Biarritz, Istanbul, and Vancouver Film Festivals. It was chosen as Best Film of the Year by the Brazilian Critics’ Association and won more than 25 awards internationally.
Jards, Rocha’s 2013 feature documentary, won Best Director at the Rio International Film Festival and was invited to New Directors/ New Films in New York, as well as IndieLisboa and the Mar del Plata Film Festival. His sixth feature, Sunday Ball (Campo de Jogo, 2015), was invited to London International Film Festival, CPH:DOX, MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, and Mostra de Sao Paulo. It was commercially released by Cinema Slate in the United States. Most of Rocha’s films are part of the permanent collection at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Icarus Films production notes
Cinema Novo
Director: Eryk Rocha
Production Companies: Coqueirão Pictures & Aruac Filmes, Diogo Dahl
Co-production: Canal Brasil & Fm Produções
Associate Producers: João Pedro Hirszman, Maria Hirszman, Irma Hirszman, Ava Rocha, Paloma Rocha, Pedro Paulo Rocha, Henrique Cava lleiro, Filmes do Serro
Written by: Eryk Rocha, Juan Posada
Researchers: Thiag o Brito, Adriana Peixoto, Renato Vallone
Research Consultant: Antonio Venancio
Editing: Renato Vallone
Music: Ava Rocha
Sound Design: Edson Secco
Brazil 2016
90 mins
Digital
Presented as part of the UK/Brazil Season of Culture 2025-26 and supported by Instituto Guimarães Rosa
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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