No intenso agora + Santiago

18:00
No intenso agora, João Moreira Salles, Brasil, 2017, 127’

Made subsequent to the discovery of an amateur cinema family archive, this film-essay is an intense, melancholic reflection on what we see in images and what is hidden behind them. What is there behind the archives of the revolution? What do those moments captured in Mao’s Communist China have in common with those captured in May 68, in Paris, or the spring of Prague? What was going on in Brazil at that time? Why do revolutions and struggles for rights in North America have a different visual imaginary? Is sentimental education also a political and visual education?

Following the film-essay tradition, the film reflects on the bodies and faces that took part in those events that changed history. As it unfolds, sometimes erratically, sometimes very precisely – as is the case with any kind of perambulation – it becomes fraught with questions. Where has become of them? What happened after the revolution? Why have we forgotten those streets and those faces?

Constructed totally out of archive material, the film not only reflects upon what we see, but also deals with the role of those who shot those images, and those who saw them at the time. The dialogue therefore goes beyond the most intimate and personal (the life of a family that travelled the world with a camera, for instance), to History, with a capital “H”. What do each and every one of those images say not only about their time but also about who filmed those images? To what extent does every people leave its very special traces in those anonymous recordings, which have made it to us today?

21:00
Santiago, João Moreira Salles, Brasil, 2007, 80’

There is room in a small apartment for an entire world to be hidden. In the year 1992, documentary director João Moreira Salles visited and filmed the butler who worked for his family for thirty years. Santiago, born in 1912, leads a secluded life, immersed in his world of memories and given over to his passions: opera and renaissance painting. His words and memory are a compilation of the universal history of the world; as much as they are the memories of an era, of a house, of a family, and of the garden of the filmmaker’s childhood. João Moreira Salles recorded that testimony, but only decided to face those images again many years later. That was when all those almost ghostly memories were transformed into a quite singular film.