Cristina de Branco - Cinesur
The title links are here: Cristina de Branco – CineSur
Cristina is a member of the Cria group in Portugal, and has been making and studying indigenous cinema in Latin America for over 10 years. The interview that follows was recorded at the Casa do Brasil de Lisboa, after the final film show that she and her colleague Miguel had put on, several years ago. The film was shown in the same way that her Cinesur group organize shows, following the tradition of Grupo Chaski in Peru. There is always an open-ended debate with the audience, during which the film directors and any invited ‘experts’ sit with the audience, not on a stage with an implicit social hierarchy.
The interview was intended to be published in one of the online papers that I collaborate with, but Cristina was due to travel to Brazil and somehow it was forgotten. But Grupo Chaski and Cinesur are still alive and well, and I hope to arrange another conversation at some point.
In the meantime, I see this as a rare document dealing with a part of Latin American cinema which is relatively unknown in Europe, so it is published here in full for the first time.
You have put on 7 monthly series of programmes at the Casa do Brasil in Lisbon, each with a different theme, and you are now doing a Ph.D. How did your interest in Cinema Latina develop?
The first time I began to watch films in a very ‘continuada’ way was while I was doing a degree in Artistic Studies in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Lisbon, 10 years ago. It was a very eccentric, confused course, because it was a peripheral part of the university, it was difficult to manage things to do with Europe. And I did another course at the Cinemateca, also quite eccentric, which covered cinema from outside Europe, there were cycles of films from Japan and the US, but I felt a great lack of films from Brazil and the rest of Latin America.
Then I went with Miguel, who was my partner at that time to do a project in Barcelona organized by a group of NGOs working with Latino immigrants in Catalunya. It was very interesting I had the opportunity to work with them in different cultural projects, and, this was in 2012, I suggested showing a cycle of films on women in contemporary Latin-American cinema. One film a week for 4 weeks, films with women directors and women protagonists. Afterwards I led a debate with a Latino immigrant, on subjects like feminine sexuality and transgender issues, in 2012 it was a new thing. Then another cycle of films by Glauber Rocha, and with RAI Cultura e Autonomia Then we went back to Sao Paulo and there is a big monument to Latin America there, and we began organizing a cineclub. It was an important point in my life because we got to know Felipe Macedo, who was a cineclub enthusiast of the old school, at that time I didn’t realise how old they were, but Felipe Macedo was an important figure in the history of cineclubs in Brazil, and of the resistance. They were the gurus of cinema Latina, and all the discussions that we had to decide on the programmes were real battles. I was completely committed to Latino cine, but some people wanted to show retrospectives of Bergman… It emotionally exhausting. We didn’t have any financial support we were all volunteers, we ran a bar and got something from the tickets. So, from this Miguel and I developed a microcinema inmigrante in Sao Paulo. We already knew about the networks of micro-cineclubs, and I was fascinated by the Grupo Chaski which began in the 80s in Peru, and after their first 2 films, Gregorio which came out in 1989, a very important film in Peruvian cinema, about a boy from a poor area on the outskirts of Lima, mestiza, indigena who struggled to survive. (Chaski = Messengers in Quechua, the people who carried messages along the Inca trails.) And then the film Juliana, which was a sequel of Gregorio, about a girl who was exploited and protected by a man to survive in the marginal life she had among street children in Lima. Two very good films.
It was a very collaborative and activist group that made documentaries, and they understood that in Peru there was no network for dissemination of films. At the end of the 80s, there was hardly any TV (1 set for 1000 people!) or cinema, not even normal commercial cinemas, except in Lima and maybe Arequipa and Cuzco, so they began to take films that they had made to the interior, and there was a huge demand from the population. They created the concept of the microcine using VHS tapes. Grupo Chaski was part of the Latin-American community cinema, and today its amazing, there are over 40 microcines in Peru, maybe 7 in Ecuador, 2 in Bolivia. I was fascinated by the idea of doing a thesis on these projects, studying how they organised themselves, although in the end I decided to study cinema inmigrante, because we are working with an immigrant population. They stimulate political discussion.
Was there no demand for Hollywood films?
Yes, for Westerns and action films, they absolutely love Rambo, I saw all 7 of them in Peru. I heard that was talked about at Grupo Chaski, but there were very few urban microcines, in Lima there are only three.
Are these films only in Spanish even in rural areas or in Quechua as well?
In Spanish, because most of the microcines are in small towns, where there is enough contact with education and the state for people to know Spanish. It’s an interesting question, and there are a lot of publications about this. But the microcines are mostly in churches or social centres, town halls, and a few in people’s homes. They generally depend on a group of a few people who organise a programme once a month, and nowadays ( the last 10 yrs) the films are very often sent by internet to the cinema – in fact a lot of demand for internet connections has been the result of wanting to have a microcine, in areas where there is no postal service, before the VHS tapes were sent by post, and people voted to get the postal service to be able to receive the cine tapes. Now they arrive in HD, with the credits and foreign films have subtitles in Spanish.
And there are big annual meetings, regional and national where people from each microcine get together to discuss problems about programming or logistical issues. The programming has quotas for films from different regions, maybe half from Latino Americano, and the US, and the other half from all over the world, Indian, Iranian, Nigerian, Japanese, French, maybe a month of cinema Indigena – the themes are discussed collectively in these big meetings. The topics are very varied, decolonization directly through the images, and there is an aspect of civic training with issues like the family, sexuality, racism, for example every March the theme is women, every August it is Pachamama, ecology. And in recent years the programs and the synopses are available online, so people outside Peru, and at festivals in Sao Paulo for example can watch them. So, I and Miguel thought it would be interesting to do the same sort of thing here in Lisbon, at the Casa do Brasil as it turned out. And we got some financial support from the Instituto de Cinema Audiovisual (ICA), of the Portuguese government. We started in January this year and we’ve shown 30 sessions over 7 monthly sessions. So, we had a cycle of films made by or about indigenous people, then the next was about immigrant life. Migration is a very important feature of life in Latin America, so it was important to link these two issues of indigenous people and migration. Then in March women’s cinema, April, because of 25th April the subject was political exiles. A lot of Brazilian filmmakers were in exile, Glauber Rocha, Miguel Arteta, Raoul Ruiz, Mario Handler, who was Uruguayan. Then in May the theme was work, with a film by Leon Hirszman, a Brazilian documentary filmmaker of the 70s, then bigger films about indigenous people in work in the mines. We followed the logic of Grupo Chaski, and in June we looked at cinema from Pernambuco, following a criterion from ICA to show films in Portuguese language, which in practice meant that about 33% were from Brazil. Then after the summer break we came back in September and Miguel chose the films for the next 3 months, and now it won’t continue but there will be other CineSur projects.
Turning to the practicalities. Was it difficult for you to get cinema teachers and critics to come along and lead the discussion? I found that aspect very interesting.
We only did that in the last two months, and following the approach of Grupo Chaski, we thought the most important thing was that this is community cinema, where no-one’s opinion is considered more important just because they are involved in the cinema industry. When they showed films in places that were not dedicated to immigrants, we still invited immigrants to comment, without privileging professionals. The aim was for all of us to learn from each other and enrich our experiences as viewers. We like everyone have different tools for analysing films: - our personal experience, our artistic studies. If we invited someone whose personal experience was related to the film, they could contribute far more to the discussion than an academic or other specialist.
And our experiences in Latin America, with indigenous cinema, and with Latin American audiences in Brazil is that people have a proximity to brutal things and have no inhibitions talking about them. I’ve attended cineclubs in Buenos Aires and Montevideo and everyone wants to talk, and to talk passionately about a film they watched. They don’t have academic training or know much about the history of cinema, but they have a perfect right to express their reactions and opinions.
We resisted inviting academics and specialists for a long time, but when we did, we told them: “you’re not here to give a lecture”. We had them sit with the audience, like you saw at Casa do Brasil, not on a stage: OK you may have some special insights to contribute, but you are still a member of the audience, the public.
Of course, in a better-known venue we could get a bigger audience, but places like the Cinemateca or the Casa de America Latina have this traditional structure that sacralises the expert, if they have one, they sit on a stage and give a mini lecture before asking for questions. In commercial cinema it’s even worse, you are expected to sit in silence and then go home, we don’t mind if people comment during the show, and we encourage discussion afterwards. Here we can have a ‘cine-cerveja’ you can get a beer at the bar while the film is on without having to go outside.
For example, there is a place in Buenos Aires, run by a woman every Friday who is a real cinephile, who just charges a symbolic ‘tip’ to come in, and then leads a very informal discussion. She is a real Porteña, very loud and talks a lot. You can get a plate of gnocchi and a glass of wine and watch a film at the same time. Commercial cinema is trying every trick they can to attract audiences, with huge multiplexes and 3D, armchairs, fountains in the foyer and what not - it’s the way global capitalism works, but these other spaces fascinate me.
I will never forget the films of Almodovar because I saw them in these places, where the conversation would go till 1AM and you could make new friends. It’s an opening up of social life instead of a passive consumer spectacle. You can’t get support from government agencies like the ICA, because they want to impose all kinds of bureaucratic conditions, about tickets, permissions, and it must be in one place all the time, not moving between various venues as we often do. They don’t understand cinema in the same way. We realised that we could end up spending more time dealing with bureaucracy than choosing films and planning a programme.
They have mobile libraries
Mobile cinema has been around since the ‘70s too. The attitude in Brazil is completely different, people are enthusiastic, and you can get support, but here no, creativity is not so welcome.
What kind of issues come up when you are choosing films? I’m thinking of for example that many films about crime and drugs are a kind of violence porn or poverty porn.
These are things that can’t be hidden, and they are important in Colombian and Mexican cinema, but there is also a ‘meta market’ that latches onto the theme of narcotraffico to sell videos, music, books, and other merchandise, and soap operas, and it makes a lot of money.
These kinds of films often just present simplistic melodramas without bringing out the real issues.
You must remember that Mexico was the first Latino country to produce cinema, and this happened during the Mexican Revolution. These films are very violent, involving drugs or not, for example the films of Maria Candelaria or India Fernandez or with Dolores del Rio where there is a lynching. But Mexican and more recently Colombian cinema deals with many kinds of violence in many ways, it is more serious than many people assume. In Colombia there is a cinema Bogotano and regional filmmaking. And part of the magic of cinema is the way it can deal with the issue of violence without simply portraying violence. I’m thinking of a Colombian film La Sirga (2012), which deals with paramilitary violence. You can’t avoid violence in Latin America, it’s not like Portugal where you can easily make films about urban issues and existential problems.
But there is a difference between films that exploit and sensationalize violence, and films that try to understand its roots.
Sure, and it would be interesting to show some of these exploitation films for the audience to discuss sometimes. Millions of people watch these films, my family does too, we shouldn’t just demonize them, without discussing them.
You know the typical TV Globo news bulletins where they keep repeating every detail of a murder and the possible motives – don’t you think this has an effect on the population of normalizing violence and glorifying the spectacle?
Our work doesn’t reach these people, maybe Grupo Chaski has achieved a wider audience, but the people we attract don’t watch this kind of TV. We’ve talked a lot about the fact that we work in a bubble, the people who come have more education, time and money, and wider networks, and the opportunity to travel. They have influence, but still, they are a small bubble. Showing films in Immigrant centres is completely different from the typical CineSur audience but also a restricted audience with very different experiences and interests in cinema. You could have five people who speak five different languages. It makes debates difficult.