This is a film made by Paula Gaitan, wife of Glauber Rocha, a famous Brazilian filmmaker who died in 1981. It chronicles his days while in exile in Portugal, in the town of Sintra. Ms. Gaitan was at the Tribeca Film Festival and explained to the audience that the film wasn't really made to be judged--simply it was a very deep expression of her feelings and memories regarding her late husband. The film is neither a feature film or documentary. Rather it's a potpourri of still images, old home movies, current images and a sprinkling of narrative interviews. If one knows nothing about Glauber Rocha, one won't learn much more about him from viewing this film. It's designed to be impressionistic so that your senses are bombarded with images and sounds. Sometimes the soundtrack is extremely overbearing as the music or the sounds start hurting one's eardrums (I believe that was intentional on the part of the filmmaker). I personally would have liked more narrative--that is more interviews with people who knew Rocha. That would have given the film more coherence. As it stands now, the film has some incredibly interesting images but is slow-paced and ironically unmoving. The film is a bit self-indulgent, sort of a vanity project on the part of the filmmaker but as she says, it's a project that she had to do because it came from her "soul". Still, one doesn't employ many people on a film and work on a project simply to satisfy one's own feelings. Ms. Gaitan should have thought more of her audience before embarking on this project. By adding in a little bit of historical narrative, that wouldn't necessarily have compromised the 'experimental' effect she was going after. Nonetheless, art house aficionados will dig this original, stream of consciousness effort.
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