Fernando Coni Campos: Lucid Dreams

In February, the Helena Solberg Cineclub, in partnership with Ciné Lumière | Institut Français Royaume-Uni, celebrates one of the most playful and free-spirited Brazilian filmmakers: Fernando Coni Campos. His three most acclaimed feature films, newly digitised and remastered, will be shown in London for the first time in the special mini-season FERNANDO CONI CAMPOS: LUCID DREAMS.

The witty fable THE WIZARD AND THE SHERIFF launches the programme on 7th February at the Embassy’s Auditorium. On the 10th, carnival Saturday, the nouvelle-vaguean film-collage JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE WORLD and the carnivalesque comedy SWEET THIEVES take over Ciné Lumière.

10th February, 1.30pm, at Ciné Lumière
JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE WORLD | VIAGEM AO FIM DO MUNDO
Dir. Fernando Coni Campos | 1968 | Brazil | 90 min. | Portuguese with English subtitles

During a plane trip, a young man reads THE POSTHUMOUS MEMOIRS OF BRÁS CUBAS by the Brazilian 19th-century novelist Machado de Assis, which triggers a swirl of sensations and delusions both in him and in other passengers: an advertising model, two nuns, a sexually frustrated middle-aged man afraid of flying, and a group of football players. The characters confront their aspirations, frustrations, wishes and fears, mixing up reality and fiction in a flow that goes to other times and spaces, including theological reflections, mass myths, 20th-century totalitarianisms and politics, changes in habits and fashion. With Caetano Veloso’s first album providing the soundtrack, Coni Campos seeks to bring together the recent history of the world while capturing the anxiety of the present. In the unconventionally fragmented narrative, various sources are added and contrasted: from pornochanchadas to Godard, from publicity and newsreels to comic books, from T.S. Eliot to sensationalist magazines, from paintings by El Greco to calendars with photos of naked women... Coni Campos’s most emblematic film of his first phase, JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE WORLD won the Silver Leopard for Best Third World Film at the Locarno Film Festival.

10th February, 3.35pm, at Ciné Lumière
SWEET THIEVES | LADRÕES DE CINEMA
Dir. Fernando Coni Campos | 1977 | Brazil | 127 min. | Portuguese with English subtitles

During Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, a crew of American filmmakers has their equipment stolen. Instead of selling the paraphernalia, the thieves decide to make a film about the 1789 revolution known as Inconfidência Mineira, a separatist conspiracy repressed by the Portuguese Crown. The community adheres to the idea with the spirit of preparing for a samba school parade. As in Carnival, when reality (with its hierarchies and hardships) is suspended for some days, and everybody can be whoever they want, the favela’s inhabitants play the 18th-century colonial elite, wear pompous costumes and declaim affected lines. With a great deal of creativity and trickery, they demonstrate their organisation and social mobilisation capacity, carnavalising history while re-telling it on their own terms. With a stellar cast that includes names such as Ruth de Souza, Léa Garcia, Grande Otelo, Antonio Pitanga, and Milton Gonçalves, Coni Campos’s most famous film is a celebration of both guerrilla-cinema and 'jeitinho brasileiro' (the resourceful Brazilian way of doing things). In the backdrop are the dictatorship in place and the struggle for freedom, conveying a parallel analysis between the country’s past and present.