LATIN AMERICAN VISIONARY CINEMA: Neighboring Sounds

2012, 131min
Brazil

Language: Portuguese, English, and Mandarin w/English subtitles

Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho

The SNF Parkway is proud to present Latin American Visionary Cinema, a month-long exploration of exciting work drawn from important voices in Latin American film over the past decade. This series of twelve films spans many genres, represents 10 countries, and includes many titles that had little or no theatrical distribution in the United States. The Latin American Visionary Cinema series is presented by PNC Bank.

NEIGHBORING SOUNDS: Films that critique corruption, inequality and their myriad effects comprise a number of the films chosen for this series, as we will repeatedly discuss art cinema’s role in national self-reflection and international culture. This episodic story is set on one rapidly changing block in the city of Recife, where an old aristocrat in a flashy mansion attempts to maintain his hold on a fiefdom increasingly dense with paranoid high-rise-dwelling yuppies and under the protection of a questionable security firm. Mendonça posits the high-end housing complex as a surrogate for Brazil itself, in an urban spin on the films of Mário Peixoto and Glauber Rocha, who found their microcosms for the nation in its vast countryside. As in Rocha’s TERRA EM TRANSE (1967), the country’s past–its legacy of colonization and slavery–is linked to its tense, uncertain present and future.

“Revelatory…The scope of his movie is narrow, but its ambitions are enormous, and it accomplishes nothing less than the illumination of the peculiar state of Brazilian (and not only Brazilian) society.” — A.O. Scott, The New York Times