The Moviegoer

June 15th: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the 35th edition of the Mutual Films Session, co-curated and organized by me and Mariana Shellard, whose screenings will take place on June 16th and 27th at the São Paulo-based unit of the Instituto Moreira Salles.

The event places into dialogue two recently restored films made by Iranian directors who were living outside their birth country in the years prior to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. With her village-set debut feature The Sealed Soil (1977), the U.S.-based filmmaker Marva Nabili (who was born in 1941) became the first woman to realize an independently produced feature-length film in Iran and only the second known female director of a feature-length film in the country’s history (following Shahla Riahi, who directed the now-lost commercial production Marjan in 1956). And with Far From Home (1975), the director Sohrab Shahid Saless (1944-1998) – who had already been declared a master among his peers of the Iranian New Wave for his first two features, A Simple Event (1973) and Still Life (1974) – declared his departure from the then-Shah-led nation by making a story about the difficulties of Turkish immigrants living in West Germany, where he would realize most of his subsequent films. Both works are at the same time aesthetically nuanced and profoundly autobiographical, as Nabili’s film narrates the story of a young Iranian woman (played by Flora Shabaviz) who feels caught between tradition and modernity in her homeland and Shahid Saless’s film focuses on a “guest worker” (played by Parviz Sayyad) whose feelings of confusion and loneliness in response to his new settings reflect the filmmaker’s own.

The June 16th screening of The Sealed Soil will feature an in-person introduction by Eliane Arakaki, a Brazilian researcher at the University of São Paulo who is writing her dissertation on representations of femininity in Iranian film. And, although Far From Home’s screenings will not feature a guest per se, its presence in the series would have been unthinkable without the support of the Goethe-Institut, which holds the restored versions of Far From Home and other works by Shahid Saless in its archive as a result of its collaboration with the nonprofit entity Shahid Saless Archive on the restorations of several of the filmmaker’s German works from their original 35mm materials. Special thanks are given to the representatives of the Goethe's São Paulo unit, Renate Heilmeier and Tatjana Lorenz, who collaborated in arranging the screenings at the Instituto.

Thanks go as well to some other people who collaborated on the screenings, among them the scholar Behrang Samsami, author of a three-volume-long biography of Sohrab Shahid Saless, who provided us with an original interview about the filmmaker’s work that can be read on the Mutual Films website in Portuguese and in English. The Mutual Films website also includes a translation into Portuguese of a 1977 interview held with Marva Nabili about The Sealed Soil that was originally realized in English for the now-defunct Canadian feminist publication Branching Out – this interview was provided from Nabili’s archive by the film’s distributor, Venera Films (whose founder, Garineh Nazarian, was actively involved in coordinating the digital restoration of the film’s 16mm negatives that was realized by the UCLA Film & Television Archive). The restored versions of Far From Home and The Sealed Soil in fact share the same North American distributor, Arbelos Films, whose founders David Marriott and Ei Toshinari provided us with materials related to them throughout the research and preparation process.

May 27th: The link above leads to a short review that I wrote for the website Screen Slate about an important Cuban film that screened yesterday in New York, at BAM, within the series FilmAfrica. Thanks go to the film programmers Steve Macfarlane and Yasmina Price, each of whom, in their way, inspired the piece.

The late Afro-Cuban director Sergio Giral's important film screened on DCP in a new 4K restoration with its screenwriter and producer, Armando Dorrego, in attendance. Below is a statement about the restoration that was generously sent to me by the artist and filmmaker Luis Gispert, who coordinated the restoration:

Sergio Giral (1937–2024) was one of the most incisive voices in Cuban cinema, known for dismantling the official myths of Cuban history with a calm, almost surgical precision. Working within and against the structures of Cuban state filmmaking, Giral carved out a body of work that confronted the legacy of slavery not as distant past, but as a living system that was shaping identity, race, and power in the Caribbean.

His most enduring contribution is the so-called “slavery trilogy,” anchored by the film El otro Francisco (1974) and followed by Rancheador (1976) and Maluala (1979). These films reject romanticized narratives of enslaved life and instead expose the mechanisms of control, resistance, and historical erasure. Giral’s approach was formally rigorous and politically sharp in blending Brechtian distance with visceral storytelling to question how history itself is constructed.

By the time that he directed María Antonia, Giral had shifted from plantation-era histories to the psychic and cultural afterlife of that history in modern Cuba. Set in 1950s Havana, María Antonia centers on an Afro-Cuban woman whose fierce independence collides with social constraint, desire, and spiritual belief. The film carries forward the concerns of the trilogy but internalizes them: what was once systemic violence becomes embodied struggle, expressed through ritual, sexuality, and urban life.

If the trilogy dissects the architecture of slavery, María Antonia shows its residue in the body and the street. Together, the films form a continuous inquiry into how history survives, mutates, and refuses to stay buried. Giral didn’t just make films about the past. He made films that insist the past is still very much in the room.

The 35 mm print of María Antonia was made for the Sundance Film Festival with burned-in English subtitles and in coordination with ICIAC (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos) and the Sundance Institute. At the time, Sergio and Maria Antonia's screenwriter, Armando Dorrego, were in Europe touring the film at festivals, as it had just played at the Malaga Film Festival after being nominated for a Goya. While they were in Paris, and after years of censorship and struggles to work as gay Black filmmakers in Cuba, Giral and Dorrego decided to defect. To give context, Giral’s film prior to María Antonia was Techo de vidrio (Glass Ceiling, 1981), the story of a contemporary Black architect in Cuba who meets limited success because of racism in the communist system. That movie was shelved, and Giral wasn’t allowed to make a film for 5 years afterwards.

Once it was known that Giral was defecting, ICIAC contacted Robert Redford and the movie was pulled from Sundance. We contacted Sundance for any records or documentation of this, but it seems that the exchange was expunged, “lost”, or flat-out denied as it would be a blight on Sundance at this point in history. An Afro-Cuban director being censored in the U.S. by an American institution at the behest of the Cuban government.

Shortly afterwards Nat Chediak, the founder of the Miami Film Festival, was able to secure the 35 mm print and premiere it in Miami. Sergio and Armando settled in Miami and took possession of the print. For a few years it was used at various film festivals and academic screenings. Then the print went into storage – deep storage.

I met Sergio Giral when I was in art school. I’m a visual artist and I have made experimental films. Sergio ran the programing of the Alliance Cinema in Miami Beach, which was the only alternative film venue in Miami in the 1990s. He also ran workshops and selected one of my student films to be part of a Cuban experimental film festival. Over the years, he served as a mentor to me.

In 2020 I made my first feature film, Cajita. Sergio and Armando served as mentors and helped with the script and production. At this time, I was told about the 35mm print of María Antonia and we agreed that it needed to be saved. I was awarded an Oolite Arts grant to perform the restoration.

The print was in rough condition, and it needed a frame-by-frame restoration in 4K. This was a labor of love, and everyone involved worked for free or under scale, as the grant was a fraction of what a film restoration of this scale requires. The restoration took over a year, and sadly, Sergio passed away before it was completed. He did attend the grant award ceremony, and he was happy that his legacy would be preserved.

I hope that this restoration of María Antonia illuminates Sergio Giral’s work to a new generation of filmmakers and lovers.

The original negatives of seven of his features are still in Cuba in the ICAIC’s vault and in need of restoration.

We hope that this restoration opens a new interest in Sergio’s work and in restoring all his films.

Restoration credits:

Restoration completed by Mongrel Inc in collaboration with Huracan Films.

Funding provided by an Oolite Arts Ellie Grant.

Project Supervisor: Luis Gispert

Historical advisor: Armando Dorrego

Project Advisor: Barron Sherer

Colorist: Javier Coello

Film transfer: The Negative Space

Soundtrack restoration: Mark Kramer

May 20th: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the second edition of a bimonthly film club event that has been organized by me and Mariana Shellard and will take place on May 22nd at the Centro Cultural São Paulo.

The event focuses on the work done by the team of the Cineteca Nacional de Chile (Chilean National Film Archive), which is located in Santiago de Chile within a complex called the Centro Cultural La Moneda. The institution was founded in 2006, and its 20th anniversary celebrations this year have included an exhibition within the Centro Cultural devoted to the history of cinema in Chile (both exhibition and production) as well as a number of series of films from the archive, including one called “Chilean Film: 80 Years” that screened the entirety of the Chilean film production that survives from 1946 – a total of four narrative features that were produced by the studio Chile Films.

We will be showing two of these films. One is the original Andes-set thriller The Man They Took (El hombre que se llevaron), which was directed by the prolific and pioneering film innovator Jorge Délano (1895-1980), who is known best in Chile for his work as a cartoonist of political satire under the pseudonym “Coke”. The other is The Lady of Death (La dama de la muerte), an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1878 short story collection The Suicide Club which is widely considered to be the first Chilean horror film and which was directed by the Argentinean filmmaker Carlos Hugo Christensen (1914-1999) during one of a number of brief stops throughout South American countries before he settled for good in Brazil in the late 1950s and went on to direct several important Gothic works there. Both films will screen on digital copies that were created by the Cineteca’s team from 16mm prints found in the archives of the Chilean television network UCV TV and with original Portuguese-language subtitles that were created for this occasion by the Brazilian film programmer and translator Leonardo Bomfim Pedrosa. Of the two filmmakers, Délano is by far the lesser known – only three of his films survive today, and as far as we are aware, Friday’s screening of The Man They Took marks the first time that the film has been shown outside Chile.

April 29th: The link above leads to an interview that I conducted with the German documentary filmmaker Viola Stephen, founder of the production company Sreda Film and the subject in focus of a retrospective at this year’s edition of the International Film Festival Play-Doc, which is held in Tui, Spain and will run from today through May 3rd. Stephan will attend the festival to present restored digital copies of five of her films (plus one that she produced) which were made in the 1990s, which she collectively refers to as the Interim Project, and which together track the progression or dissolution of Eastern Europe in the years immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the ex-Soviet Union as seen through the often unspoken impact of political shifts on peoples’ everyday lives. As I indicate in the interview’s introduction, Stephan was one of the easiest interview subjects that one could imagine – all I had to do was ask my first question and then step aside for her to provide a monologue that conveys the tragicomic essence of each one of her consistently surprising and insightful humanist films.

The retrospective of Stephan’s films is one of four special programs on display at this year’s edition of Play-Doc, together with focuses on the works of the contemporary French-Portuguese director Maureen Fazendeiro, the unknown Galician amateur filmmaker Rafael Luca de Tena, and perhaps most vitally, the late Brazilian documentary filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho, a foundational reference for considering the relations between documentarians and their human subjects who will be represented at the festival with 11 films.

April 24th: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the first edition of a bimonthly film club event that has been organized by me and Mariana Shellard for a public multifunctional cultural space in São Paulo called the Centro Cultural São Paulo, with whom we previously collaborated on three film series realized between 2015 and 2017. Each edition of this new event will focus on a different institution (public or private) concerned with film preservation through a double feature of programs representing films in its archive.

The inaugural edition presents a small slice of the work done by Milestone Film & Video, the essential American distribution company (currently part of the structure of the larger distributor Kino Lorber) that was founded in 1990 by Amy Heller and Dennis Doros, who have retired this year from running the company and handed its reins to Maya Cade. Milestone’s work privileges voices that have been historically underrepresented in American cinema, whether they be Queer, Black, female, or other. In the process, the company has come to represent a number of astonishing film classics, including the majority of audiovisual works realized by two of film history’s greatest artists – Charles Burnett and Shirley Clarke.

The April 24th double-feature at the CCSP represents two films held by Milestone (both of which were restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive) that focus on the conditions of Native American peoples in North America. The American still photographer Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) realized the first-ever feature-length ethnographic film when he made In the Land of the Head Hunters in 1914 in British Columbia with members of the Kwakwaka'wakw people, who agreed to represent participants in an adventure-filled historical epic and, in the process, both recreate their ancestors’ traditions and allow themselves to stage rituals that were prohibited by law at the time of filming. The British-American film student Kent Mackenzie (1930-1980) realized one of the most vital works of American neorealism in 1961 when he completed The Exiles with Native American nonprofessional actors who were living displaced lives in the working-class Los Angeles neighborhood of Bunker Hill, which was slated to soon be destroyed by “urban renewal”.

Crucially, neither film was directed by an Indigenous person, a fact that feels entirely coherent to the historical moments when they were made – cinema made by Native Americans only really came into existence with documentaries in the 1980s, then fiction films in the late 1990s. One of Milestone’s most recent titles to premiere, in fact, is the digitally restored version of a native-to-video marvel from 2002 called The Business of Fancydancing, which is the lone fiction feature to date that has been directed by the wonderful Spokane writer Sherman Alexie (who was born in 1966).

Mariana and I will introduce the 6 P.M. screening of In the Land of the Head Hunters at the Centro Cultural São Paulo, and the 8 P.M. screening of The Exiles will be introduced by Lahayda Mamani Poma, a Brazilian visual art curator of Aymara descent who currently works with a private art center called the Instituto Tomie Ohtake. Additional contextualizing information for the films can be found in the online-only booklet that Mariana has compiled to accompany the series. Its materials include translations into Portuguese of a 2018 interview that we held with Doros and Heller about Milestone’s work, a fine 2015 journalistic piece by Christina Rose for the publication Indian Country Today about the making of In the Land of the Head Hunters, and a 2008 review of The Exiles for Film Comment that was written by the critic, filmmaker, and teacher Thom Andersen. In his celebrated 2003 essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself, Andersen says about The Exiles: “Better than any other movie, it proves that there once as a city here, before they tore it down and built a simulacrum.”

April 17th: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the 34th edition of the Mutual Films Session, co-curated and organized by me and Mariana Shellard, whose screenings will take place between April 22nd and 26th at the São Paulo-based unit of the Instituto Moreira Salles.

The event places into dialogue six films which collectively raise questions surrounding reality and myth during the first two decades of the Republic of Senegal's existence following the African former colony’s declaration of independence from France in April of 1960. The series accordingly consists of two programs, one of documentary and one of fiction, whose films are spoken in French and in Wolof respectively. The idea for the combination of films was first shared with us by the Brazilian film scholar Marcelo Rodrigues Souza Ribeiro, a professor at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) who has extensively researched the cinemas of the filmmakers in focus and who has guest-written the series’s curatorial essay.

The first program features four Senegalese newsreels made between 1966 and 1976, which were digitally restored by the Cineteca di Bologna in 2023 from 16mm prints and which originally pertained to a series sponsored by the Ministry of Information called Les Actualités sénégalaises (“The Senegalese Actualities”, or “News from Senegal”). From 1960 to 1975, the series was supervised by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1925-1987), an important filmmaker, administrator, and film historian who was born in Benin and effectively raised in France before spending most of his adult life in Senegal. Vieyra also directed two of the newsreels on display, one being 1966’s magisterial Le Senegal et le Festival Mondial des Arts Negres (Senegal and the World Black Arts Festival) and the other being 1971’s more concise Ife / 3eme Festival des Arts (Ife – Third Arts Festival).

The other two newsreels in the program, Sénégal an XVI (Senegal Year XVI) and Voyage aux Antilles du Président Senghor (Martinique et Guadaloupe) (Voyage to the Antilles by President Senghor (Martinique and Guadaloupe) (both from 1976), were shot by the Senegalese cameramen Babacar Guèye, Orlando Lopez, and Georges Caristan, the latter two of whom were also collaborators of the great Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène (1923-2007), who appears in different contexts throughout all four newsreels as a vital figure in Senegalese public life.

Sembène also exists front and center as the protagonist of a fifth short documentary that will screen at the Instituto Moreira Salles alongside the newsreels, this being the independently produced Behind the Scenes: The Making of “Ceddo” (1981), a record made by Vieyra on the set of and in the editing room for Sembène’s 1977 historical epic of the same name. Ceddo presents the resistance of several inhabitants of an unnamed precolonial village against a forced conversion to Islam, and a digitally restored version of Sembène's film (recently realized by The Criterion Collection alongside digital restorations of other Sembène titles such as Emitaï and Guelwaar) will screen in Program 2.    

Vieyra additionally acted as the production manager on Ceddo, a role that he played on several Sembène films. A curiosity about Behind the Scenes is that, at the moment of its completion, Ceddo (whose name is a Wolof-language word for “the outsiders” or “the rebels”) had not yet screened publicly in Senegal due to a ban placed on it by the government of the Republic of Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor (who ruled the country from 1960 to 1980). The ostensible reason for the ban was Sembène’s refusal to alter the film’s name from Ceddo to Cedo (one “d”) in consonance with the official Senegalese orthography of the time; however, scholars have since widely speculated that the Christian Senghor’s concern with the possibility of provoking the leadership of his country’s majority-Muslim population played an additional role. Either way, Sembène’s negation led to a decade of struggle until he was able to realize his next film, 1988’s Camp de Thiaroye, during which time Vieyra passed away prematurely from illness. Today, both artists are considered essential to understanding the modern African cinema.

The screening of the documentary program on April 22nd will be introduced by the Brazilian film editor Cristina Amaral, who is renowned for her work with experimental and independent-minded film artists on works such as Raquel Gerber’s Ôri (1989), Carlos Reichenbach’s Buccaneer Soul (1993), Andrea Tonacci’s The Hills of Disorder (2006), and Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta’s Dry Ground Burning (2022). Both screenings of Ceddo will feature a short video introduction by Ousmane Sembène’s son, Alain Sembène, who has been crucial in the recent initiatives to restore his father’s films.

Several other people are to thank for their participation in the series, beginning with Thomas Sparfel and Jeanne Latourrette of the Cinematheque of the French Embassy in Brazil for their work in providing the Institut Français and Cinémathèque Afrique’s digitally restored copy of Behind the Scenes: The Making of “Ceddo”. Thanks also go, among others, to Marco Lena and Tiziana Manfredi, a pair of Italian film preservationists based in Senegal who were actively involved in restoring the newsreels and who graciously shared some of their research with us; Stéphane Vieyra, one of Paulin Soumanou Vieyra’s sons, who through the association PSV-Films has worked to preserve his father’s legacy; and Sílvio Marcus de Souza Correa, a Brazilian professor of history at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) whose work with African history has led him to undertake multiple projects related both to Sembène and to Vieyra, including the realization of screenings of Vieyra's films held in four Brazilian cities last year in honor of the filmmaker's centennial.

The Mutual Films website features two original Portuguese-language translations to accompany Marcelo Ribeiro’s essay and our program synopses. One is of a tribute to Vieyra that was originally written in French in 2004 by Sembène for the France-based journal and publishing house Présence Africaine for the fiftieth anniversary of Vieyra's 1955 film Afrique-sur-Seine (co-directed with Mamadou Sarr), which is widely considered to be the first film made by filmmakers who were native to Sub-Saharan Africa. Another is of a 2025 interview that was originally published in French through the website Africultures and in English through the Black Camera Journal, a publication of Indiana University Bloomington. The conversation presents three of the filmmakers’ sons (Alain Sembène, Stéphane Vieyra, and Jacques Vieyra) as they describe to the French film critic and programmer Olivier Barlet and the Senegalese political scientist Saïba Bayo the circumstances that led them to donate their fathers’ materials to the university’s Black Film Center & Archive.

February 24th: The link above leads to a Portuguese-language review of the film Queen Kelly, directed by Erich von Stroheim, which was written by the Brazilian film critic Luiz Zanin after the reconstructed version of the film screened last year during the most recent edition of the São Paulo International Film Festival. The film will screen again in São Paulo (in a 4K projection that calls attention to the nitrate of the original material) on Wednesday, February 25th at 8:30 P.M. at the commercial arthouse theater CineSesc – this screening has been produced by me and Mariana Shellard on behalf of the theater.

Last year’s shows included the attendance of the American film preservationist Dennis Doros, who is likely known best for co-founding the distribution company Milestone Film & Video with his wife Amy Heller. Information about the new version of Queen Kelly can be conferred in the extensive presskit that Milestone has assembled. Suffice to say for now that it represents something of a dream project for Doros to bring closer to wholeness a film that was not only never completed (its production was canceled before the end of the shoot), but one that effectively killed a great filmmaker’s directorial career. Stroheim made only a small number of films, and even an incomplete one counts as a treasure.

February 10th: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the 33rd edition of the Mutual Films Session, co-curated and organized by me and Mariana Shellard, whose screenings will take place between today (February 10th) and February 22nd at the São Paulo-based unit of the Instituto Moreira Salles.

The event places into dialogue films directed by members of the only dynasty in known history of three female film directors. Nutsa Gogoberidze (1902-1966) was the first woman to direct films in the country of Georgia and will be represented with her two surviving films, the mid-length documentary Buba (1930) and the short fiction feature Ujmuri (1934). Her daughter, Lana Gogoberidze (born in 1928), became one of the great artists in Eastern European film history and will be represented with her first feature, the three-part portmanteau film Under One Sky (1961), as well as her most recent film, a feature-length documentary about Nutsa’s legacy and impact on her work called Mother and Daughter, Or The Night is Never Complete (2023). Lana co-dircted this second film with her daughter and producer, a fellow filmmaker named Salome Alexi, who will also be represented in the series with a splendid medium-length fiction film called Felicità (2009) that was inspired by a novel by Lana’s frequent collaborator, the important Georgian writer Zaira Arsenishvili. All five films will screen in high-resolution digital copies, and Lana and Salome have provided video introductions for the screenings of Under One Sky and Felicità.

The series takes as reference a number of showcases of the family’s work that have recently happened in Europe, including a series of films by early women Soviet filmmakers that was held at Il Cinema Ritrovato in 2020 (co-curated by Irène Bonnaud and Bernard Eisenschitz); a historically expansive retrospective of Georgian cinema that was held at the Cinemateca Portuguesa that same year (curated by Marcelo Felix); and a traveling retrospective of Lana Gogoberidze’s films that was held at locations such as the Arsenal in Berlin and the Austrian Filmmuseum (co-curated by Gaby Babić and Barbara Wurm).

January 5th: The link above leads to the 2025 edition of La Internacional Cinéfila (“The International Cinephile”), a year-end Spanish-language survey of cinematic happenings conducted annually by the Argentinean film critic and programmer Roger Koza. I participated as I have every year since 2014, though this year was perhaps my most reduced contribution, since in 2025 I managed the demands of parenting a young child (among other compromises) in ways that prevented me from watching enough new films to feel comfortable submitting a Top 5. (From what I missed on the festival circuit, the titles that most immediately arouse my curiosity are Lav Diaz’s Magellan and Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf.) I contributed to some other categories that Roger made available to the survey’s participants, and I include these contributions below in their original English-language versions:

A film from my country (U.S. edition):

Lover, Lovers, Loving, Love (dir. Jodie Mack)

A kind of breakthrough film for Jodie Mack, whose filmography has already been full of them. The new work feels like her fullest attempt yet to deal with the entirety of the life-and-death cycle, which she does through deploying dazzling stroboscopic images of nature (mainly leaves and flowers) over the course of just under 15 minutes. Due to its extraordinary interplay of light and darkness, the new work is one of her films that most demands to be seen in the cinema, where an entire room’s inhabitants can pass through the life-and-death cycle together.

A discovery:

Ghazl El-Banat / Adolescente, sucre d’amour / The Razor’s Edge (dir. Jocelyne Saab, 1985)

The first fiction feature made by the great Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab (1948-2019) was reedited after its Cannes premiere and released as A Suspended Life / Une vie suspendue. The 4K restoration of the Cannes cut attempts to present a work that has not been seen publicly in 40 years. The impressionistic tale of a young teenage girl growing up in the late stages of the Lebanese Civil War serves as the unofficial fourth part of Saab’s Beirut Trilogy. Her humanist films are popular now in good part for political reasons, but we should also value their inner life and beating heart.

Actor or actress of the year:

Wagner Moura, O agente secreto / The Secret Agent (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil)

I haven’t seen the film yet, so I can’t evaluate the performance. However, with Moura’s success this year and Fernanda Torres’s recent awards tour thanks to last year’s Brazilian breakout Ainda estou aqui / I’m Still Here (among other examples), it’s become clear that Latin American actors have achieved a status that once seemed exclusive to Europeans: The possibility of being embraced around the world both by critics and by awards bodies for work done in one’s native and non-English language. Fingers crossed for the Oscar’s acting categories to consistently honor actors in non-English-language films made in Asian countries as well.

December 8th: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about a small and somewhat self-explanatory film series co-curated and organized by me and Mariana Shellard for the São Paulo-based arthouse theater CineSesc. The screenings propose a dialogue between two films directed by the great American filmmaker Nicholas Ray (1911-1979) about the terrors of domesticity and cracks in the American Dream. I will introduce tonight’s screening of a 4K restoration of Rebel Without a Cause (1955), which commemorates its 70th anniversary this year. And Mariana will present tomorrow night’s screening of a 2K restoration of Bigger Than Life (1956), which will commemorate its 70th anniversary in 2026.

The two films explore themes dear to Ray’s cinema that manifested themselves in his first feature, They Live By Night (1948), and continued through now-classic works such as In a Lonely Place (1951), On Dangerous Ground (1951), The Lusty Men (1952), and Johnny Guitar (1954). All these films, for instance, contain a tragically unrealized dream of home. This idea and others are explored in a beautiful essay about Bigger Than Life that was originally written in English by the American film critic B. Kite for The Criterion Collection's home video release of the film and that we have translated into Portuguese and posted on the Mutual Films website for this occasion. Another thing that Ray’s films have in common is the extent to which they take advantage of the properties of cinema and should be seen on a big screen, with the series’s two films representing an especially masterful usage of the CinemaScope format.

December 3rd: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the 32nd edition of the Mutual Films Session, co-curated and organized by me and Mariana Shellard, whose screenings will take place between today (December 3rd) and December 20th at the São Paulo-based unit of the Instituto Moreira Salles.

The event proposes a dialogue between two filmmakers who were interested in exploring the human soul. The Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889-1968) is represented with his final feature, the chamber drama Gertrud (1964), as well as They Caught the Ferry (1948), which is among the best and most surprising of his little-known pedagogical shorts. And the German experimental filmmaker and painter Dore O. (1946-2022) is represented with a selection of five short and medium-length films, including the first four films that she directed solo (1968’s Alaska, 1969’s Lawale, 1971’s Kaldalon, and 1972’s Blonde Barbarei), as well as an homage to a French cinema legend called Stern des Méliès (aka The Star of Méliès, from 1982).

The digitally preserved copies of Dreyer’s films have been made available by the Danish Film Institute, whose initiatives related to the filmmaker have also included the mounting of an extensive Dreyer-themed website. The newly restored films made by Dore O. (which were restored in 2K, in several cases under the filmmaker’s supervision, and often without any celluloid-based screening copies available) represent a project undertaken by the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin and spearheaded by the institution’s film preservationist and researcher Masha Matzke. (The audio recording of a talk that Matzke gave in English about Dore O.’s cinema at Harvard University last year may be found here.)

Dore O.’s films are presented at the Instituto Moreira Salles with the generous support of the Goethe-Institut São Paulo, an institution that (together with the Goethe-Institut in Rio de Janeiro) has previously collaborated with Mutual Films on screenings of works by the German experimental filmmakers Heinz Emigholz and Ute Aurand. The December 3rd screening at IMS of Gertrud and Stern des Méliès will feature an in-person introduction by the Brazilian film critic, programmer, teacher, and screenwriter Lorenna Montenegro, whose research interests include traditions of classical narrative cinema as well as the history of cinema directed by women. The December 4th screening at IMS of Dore O.’s first four solo films and They Caught the Ferry will feature an in-person introduction by the Brazilian painter, film critic, and curator Roberta Pedrosa, who currently programs the short film selection for Rio de Janeiro’s experimental-minded Ecrã Festival (alongside Gabriel Falcão) and who has conducted studies of bodies of work by female experimental filmmakers who find various ways of working in the first person.

The Mutual Films website contains three original Portuguese-language translations, in addition to the curatorial texts and image collages (made by Mariana) that may also be found in the Instituto’s monthly film booklet for December. One is of an overview essay about Dore O.’s cinema by Masha Matzke that was originally published in English and in French to accompany the DVD release in 2021 of six of Dore O.’s restored films by the France-based distributor Re:Voir. Another is of a short, impressionistic piece about Dore O.’s first solo film, Alaska, which was written by Ute Aurand and originally published in English within a vast 2023 critical anthology edited by Matzke called Figures of Absence: The Films of Dore O. The third is of a critical essay about Dreyer’s cinema that was originally written in German in 1974 by the great German film critic Frieda Grafe, who is likely known best for her work with the publication Filmkritik and whose writings (like much of German-language film criticism) are effectively nonexistent in Brazilian Portuguese. In all cases, thanks go to the authors and rights-holders (including the publisher Brinkmann & Bose in the case of the late Grafe’s estate) for giving their permission for the translations, and additional thanks go to Gerard-Jan Claes and the team of the invaluable Belgian online publication Sabzian, which posted an English-language translation of Grafe’s essay in 2023.

November 5th: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about a film series co-curated and organized by me and Mariana Shellard that will take place between this Friday (November 7th) and November 23rd in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre at a beautiful public venue called the Cinemateca Capitólio.

The series presents eight films by a recently deceased great Hungarian filmmaker named Judit Elek (1937-2025) over the course of six programs, the majority of which are presented with the generous support of the Hungarian Consulate in São Paulo. A video introduction sent to us by Elek herself in October, three weeks before her passing, will screen on the series’s opening night, before what is likely her most celebrated film, her debut feature The Lady from Constantinople (1969), whose name in the original Hungarian inspired the series title: “An island on the mainland”. (Elek herself explains a bit about the name here.)

The series’s first weekend focuses on Elek’s first two decades of production. November 8th will feature a program of her first three films, all brilliant hybrids of documentary and fiction realized within the context of an important space for young filmmakers that Elek helped found called the Béla Balázs Studio, that will be followed by a public talkback between me and the feminist critic and cinephile Carla Oliveira. On November 9th, I will introduce a double-feature of two extraordinary feature-length documentaries that Elek made in the mid-1970s (a time during which Hungary’s socialist government banned her from fiction filmmaking for political reasons) that work together as a compelling portrait of some residents of a Hungarian village called Istenmezeje (“On the Field of God”).

Mariana and I will send video introductions for the screenings of Elek’s two later films that will show at the Cinemateca Capitólio on November 22nd and 23rd, both of which point to themes that emerge throughout the second half of her career. The autobiographical coming-of-age drama Awakening (1995), based on a novel that Elek wrote at the same time that she was making her first films, uses the figure of a teenage girl growing up in Budapest post-war to deal directly with Elek’s history as a Jewish Holocaust survivor.  And The Trial of Martinovics and the Hungarian Jacobins (1981), which Elek directed for Hungarian television, initiates a cycle of films in which she deals with Hungary’s history more broadly as a way of navigating and commenting upon the complex times through which she lived.

Elek was punished by her society multiple times in her life – as a Jew, as a woman, as a skeptic of communism, and of course as an artist. She showed extraordinary resolution nonetheless until the end.

We first became aware of her work shortly before the premieres of digital restorations of 10 of her films (all realized by the Hungarian National Film Archive) in 2023 at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, whose team also published a generously assembled book about the filmmaker. For our website, we have translated into Portuguese one of the book's essays, which is a heartfelt critical overview of Elek's cinema that was originally written in English by the younger Hungarian filmmaker Gyöngyi Fazekas.

October 8th: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the 31st edition of the Mutual Films Session, co-curated and organized by me and Mariana Shellard, whose screenings will take place between today (October 8th) and October 12th at the São Paulo-based unit of the Instituto Moreira Salles.

The event places in dialogue films by two of the most important filmmakers of Lebanese cinema, both of whom potently presented the impact of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). Heiny Srour (who was born to a Lebanese Jewish family in 1945) will be represented with her lone fiction feature, the instigating Leila and the Wolves (1984), which presents an absorbing panorama of the Arab female experience through scenes of Lebanese and Palestinian women from the time of British Palestine in the 1920s through the siege of Beirut in 1982. Jocelyne Saab (who was born to a Lebanese Christian family in 1948 and passed away in 2019) will be represented with the three medium-length films that comprised what she called “The Beirut Trilogy” (1976’s Beirut, Never Again, 1978’s Letter from Beirut, and 1982’s Beirut, My City), as well as an extraordinary poetic short film called Children of War (1976), all of which deal with the impact of the war over the psyche and day-to-day lives of the Lebanese population. Srour and Saab’s films all hold tremendous and surprising continuing relevance.

All five films will screen in recently made digital restorations, with Leila and the Wolves having been restored in 2K in 2021 by the CNC (Centre Nacional du Cinéma), in France, from the film’s original 16mm negatives (housed at the British Film Institute) and under Srour’s supervision. Saab’s films were also restored in 2K from their original 16mm materials, in this case, by a small nonprofit organization based in Marseille called the Jocelyne Saab Association, which organized workshops in Beirut with the team of the Cinémathèque suisse to teach and train Lebanese technicians to carry out the digital restoration work.

Both screenings of Leila and the Wolves will feature an original and memorable video introduction recorded by Heiny Srour. The screening of the film this Thursday (October 9th) will be followed by a public talkback at IMS with the Brazilian film programmer and researcher Carol Almeida, whose extensive work with Arab cinema has included the programming of films directed both by Srour and by Saab (including within the context of the Arab Women’s Film Festival in Brazil, for which she works as a programmer alongside Alia Ayman and the series's founder, Analu Bambirra).

The Mutual Films website includes pages with two original supplements to the screenings, both of which are Portuguese-language translations of materials found in English within the splendid dossiers on the filmmakers that were compiled in 2021 by the team of the Belgian online publication Sabzian for the series “Out of the Shadows” (held in partnership with Belgium’s Courtisane Festival), which presented films by Srour and Saab alongside three other notable Arab female filmmakers (Assia Djebar of Algeria, Selma Baccar of Tunisia, and Atteyat Al-Abnoudy of Egypt). Srour is represented with a translation of “Between Three Stools”, one of several fascinating essays by her that successfully combine politics, film theory, and memoir. Saab is represented with a translation of an interview held with her by the French university professor Sylvie Dallet in 1983 (soon after the premiere of Beirut, My City), as well as a short tribute to her that was made by the Iranian filmmaker Bani Khoshnoudi on the occasion of screenings of Saab’s films that were held at the Centre Pompidou in 2023. Saab, in addition to being a great artist, was a figure beloved by many, and in addition to her text, Khoshnoudi shares the sentiment that “anything to remember Jocelyne with love is important.”

The São Paulo screenings mark at least the sixth time that Srour and Saab’s works have been programmed in dialogue with each other since 2021, following showcases in places such as the festival Il Cinema Ritrovato (in Bologna, as programmed by Cecilia Cenciarelli), the festival FICUNAM (in Mexico City, as programmed by Karina Solórzano), and the Pacific Film Archives (in Berkeley, as programmed by Jonathan Mackris). From a distance, the repetition may seem curious, considering that, although the two artists were contemporaries, they never worked together and held great ideological and philosophical differences between them.

The French programmer and scholar Olivier Hadouchi, who interviewed them both and organized the first large retrospective of Saab’s films (along with Nicole Brenez) in 2013 at the Cinémathèque française, told us that they knew and respected each other while following their own paths. These paths crossed at various points with those of a number of other remarkable filmmakers from Lebanon, male and female, who also came of age artistically in the aftermath of the outbreak of their country’s bitter and sad internal conflicts, and whose films comprising the New Lebanese Cinema (from Borhane Alaouié, Maroun Bagdadi, Randa Chahal Sabag, and others) continue to exist and to inspire.

August 18th: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the 30th edition of the Mutual Films Session, co-curated and organized by me and Mariana Shellard, whose screenings will take place on August 21st and August 30th at the São Paulo-based unit of the Instituto Moreira Salles.

The event proposes a dialogue between two great masters in the art of creating imaginary worlds. The vision of the renowned Austro-American filmmaker Josef von Sternberg (1894-1969) will be represented with two films. The final feature that he directed, Anatahan (1953/1958, also known as The Saga of Anatahan), was filmed in Japan with an all-Japanese cast and crew except for Sternberg, who narrates the story of a group of Japanese soldiers shipwrecked in the Mariana Islands near the end of the Second World War that refused to accept Japan’s surrender until 1951. The version of Anatahan that will screen in São Paulo is a digitally restored presentation of Sternberg’s 1958 cut of the film, which contains light changes made to the original version – Sternberg completed his cut five years after the film’s first release, but it only began to circulate in the 1970s, some years after his death. (This restored version of the film screened for the first time in Brazil in 2017 at the Olhar de Cinema – Curitiba International Film Festival.)

We will also show the lone surviving fragment of Sternberg’s now-lost last silent film, The Case of Lena Smith (1929), which was found in 2003 in an antique shop in China by the Japanese silent film scholar Hiroshi Komatsu and subsequently restored by the team of the Austrian Filmmuseum. The film illustrates memories of Sternberg’s childhood in Vienna (before he moved with his parents to New York as a boy) through the story of a woman that loses her son twice, with the second time being likely irreparable due to his being called to serve in the First World War.

Sternberg’s films will screen in dialogue with 10 short films made by the Japanese animator, visual artist, graphic designer, and experimental filmmaker Keiichi Tanaami (1936-2024), who was himself marked by images that he encountered as a child during the Second World War. Tanaami’s short films often present disturbing, psychedelic, and formally intense images that deal with the trauma hanging over Japanese society in consequence both of the war and of the grotesque deformation caused by the intrusions of American pop culture during the U.S. military occupation of Japan that lasted for seven years after the war’s conclusion.

The program presents a survey of Tanaami’s cinematic production with films made between 1971 and 2016 (most of them eight minutes or less in runtime), which can essentially be divided into two sides: A prolific and sardonic explosion of works like Artificial Paradise (1975), Crayon Angel (1971), and Good-By Elvis and USA (1971) realized between 1971 and 1975, and a more rhythmically calm but nonetheless emotionally perturbed series of films made between 2000 and 2021. Many of these late works were realized in hand-drawn fashion by Tanaami in collaboration with his friend, teaching colleague, and fellow animator Nobuhiro Aihara. After Aihara’s death in 2011, Tanaami then realized a final sequence of videos exploring his previous themes within the contexts of Japanese history and Western art history, including the final film in the São Paulo program, The Laughing Spider (2016). Regardless of the moment in which Tanaami made his films, however, the violence of his youth continues to lurk closely at hand.

Tanaami’s film Crayon Angel will screen before Anatahan, and the fragment of The Case of Lena Smith will screen before a sequence of 9 of Tanaami’s films. The Tanaami program will also feature a video introduction by the British-Japanese film curator and scholar Julian Ross, who has worked extensively with Tanaami’s cinema and who interviewed the artist in 2018 on behalf of the nonprofit organization Collaborative Cataloging Japan.

The Mutual Films website features three original translations into Portuguese of previously published pieces as supplements to the series’s curatorial essay and program synopses. One is a text about the making of Anatahan that can be found in Josef von Sternberg’s now-out-of print memoir Fun in a Chinese Laundry, which features an ironic gaze towards groupthink and institutional attitudes that is as clear as any to be found in the director’s films. Another is an essay by Hiroshi Komatsu about the discovery of the Lena Smith fragment, as well as the film’s reception in Japan upon its initial release, that was taken from the Austrian Filmmuseum’s beautifully assembled 2007 book about the film (which was co-edited by Michael Omasta and the Filmmuseum’s then-director, Alexander Horwath). And the third piece is a translation of Tanaami’s preface to the catalogue of his last and largest career-spanning exhibition, Adventures in Memory, which opened at the National Art Center in Tokyo the day before his death on August 9th of last year.

The series is inevitably commemorative in its coinciding with a year since Tanaami’s passing. It has also been 80 years since August of 1945, when history permanently changed with the dropping of two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – a gesture that continues to remind us of how an entire society can be traumatized by war, and of how most victims of war could never have deserved their status as targets. The films by Tanaami and Sternberg (whose works like The Last Command, Morocco, and Dishonored are frequently skeptical of military ideals) lead a viewer to wonder what humanity has learned since that time.

June 10th: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the 29th edition of the Mutual Films Session, co-curated and organized by me and Mariana Shellard, whose screenings will take place on June 10th, 11th, 21st, and 28th at the São Paulo-based unit of the Instituto Moreira Salles.

The event proposes a dialogue between three films and two programs united by the theme of communal self-sufficiency in the face of monstrous progress. On one side of the program is the little-known and absolutely sterling Swiss-German co-production Techqua Ikachi, Land – My Life (1989), a poetic feature-length documentary about the daily lives of the Hopi residents of the Arizona village of Hotevilla that was made in collaboration between the Swiss filmmaker Anka Schmid (born in 1961), the Swiss visual artist Agnes Barmettler (born in 1945), and the Hopi tribal spokesperson James Danaqyumptewa (1916-1996). On the other side are the short The Tuna Trap (1961) and the feature-length Vilarinho das Furnas (1971), two films directed by the Portuguese filmmaker António Campos (1922-1999), who was a foundational figure in his national cinema’s tendency to explore the lives of common people as their quotidian routines face extinction.

Techqua Ikachi was restored in 2K in 2023 by the team of the German entity Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V. with materials located in the archives of the Deutsche Kinemathek and the Cinémathèque suisse and in close collaboration with Anka Schmid (who also recorded a brief video introduction that will play before the screenings of Techqua Ikachi at the Instituto Moreira Salles). António Campos’s films were both digitized in 4K by the Cinemateca Portuguesa in recent years as part of a larger project to digitize the filmmaker’s body of work on the occasion of his centennial in 2022.

The process of digitizing Campos’s films is briefly discussed by Tiago Baptista, the head conservationist of ANIM (the Cinemateca Portuguesa’s preservation department), within a Portuguese-language supplement to the screenings that is included on the Mutual Films website. His words follow an essay about Campos’s cinema that was written by the Portuguese film critic Francisco Ferreira and originally published in English, Spanish, and Galician by the Spain-based festival Play-Doc for a retrospective of Campos’s cinema in 2022. (It appears online here for the first time in its original Portuguese.) For the Techqua Ikachi supplement, we have translated into Portuguese statements by the three filmmakers that can be located in English and in German on Anka Schmid’s website and on the Arsenal’s website.

April 15th: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the 28th edition of the Mutual Films Session, co-curated and organized by me and Mariana Shellard, whose screenings will take place on April 16th and 27th at the São Paulo-based unit of the Instituto Moreira Salles.

The event proposes a double bill of films that deal with the dehumanizing nature of work and the capacities of individuals to proclaim their humanity in the face of it. On one side of the program is the American independent classic Nothing But a Man (1964), directed by the German émigré Michael Roemer (born in 1928), who used his memories of Nazi Germany to examine the dynamics of a racist system of labor as it applies to a Black man named Duff Anderson (played by Ivan Dixon) doing his best to survive in 1960s Alabama. On the other side is Life of a Shock Force Worker (1972), a masterwork of the Yugoslavian “Black Wave” movement that was directed by the underrated Bosnian artist Bahrudin “Bato” Čengić (1933-2007) and that presents a fictionalized rendering of the exploits of the most celebrated Yugoslavian miner, Alija Sirotanović (played here by Adem Čejvan), whose record-breaking productivity made him a national hero with what are shown to be tragicomic results. In both films, the worker suffers, regardless of whether the society that he or she inhabits calls itself capitalist or communist – and in both films as well, the suffering applies to the women who are made to accept their social roles at least as much as it applies to the men.

The series also calls attention to other important artists that worked on the films. The cinematographer, co-writer, and co-producer of Nothing But a Man was Roemer’s university classmate Robert M. Young (1924-2024), who subsequently became one of the great liberal filmmakers of low-budget American cinema with works like ¡Alambrista! and The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez. The cinematographer of Life of a Shock Force Worker was the Slovenian-Macedonian artist Karpo Godina (born in 1943), and the film’s unusual aesthetic of scenes shot poetically as tableaux vivants was inspired by a similar style that Godina developed in a series of brilliant short films made prior to Čengić’s feature.

One of the shorts, the colorful musical documentary Litany of Happy People, will screen at the Instituto Moreira Salles in the same program as Life of a Shock Force Worker. As with Godina’s other short films, it was recently digitally restored in collaboration between the Slovenian Cinematheque and the Austrian Filmmuseum. Both of these institutions also worked on the recent 4K restoration of Life of a Shock Force Worker, which additionally included the participation of the Croatian Film Archive and the Sarajevo Film Center and was completed with the vital support of a prize given by the Association of European Cinematheques (ACE). Nothing But a Man, which has previously circulated in good 35mm prints, will be presented in a new digital copy from a 4K scan that The Criterion Collection’s team made of the film’s original negatives (located at the George Eastman House) in partnership with the distributor The Film Desk.

The series page on the Mutual Films website includes two supplements to the curatorial essay and synopses (which can also be found in the Instituto's monthly film booklet). One is a translation into Portuguese of an interview, originally published in English in 2022 in Filmmaker Magazine, that the American critic Nicolas Rapold conducted with Michael Roemer about Nothing But a Man and his follow-up film, the delightful dark comedy The Plot Against Harry. (The now 97-year-old Roemer continues to give interviews and participate in events related to his films and will be honored next month with a retrospective in Spain.) The other is a translation of an English-language interview that Mariana and I conducted over e-mail this year with Karpo Godina regarding his work both as a director and as a cinematographer of myriad important titles from Yugoslavian film history, in addition to his ongoing work of supervising their digital restorations.

Warm thanks go to Godina and to his wife and collaborator, Darja Hlavka Godina, for making possible the screenings of Litany of Happy People. Notes of gratitude also go to the Slovenian curators and researchers Jurij Meden (who currently works for the Austrian Filmmuseum) and Nace Zavrl (who is currently pursuing doctoral work at Harvard University) for helping us better appreciate the legacy not only of Yugoslavian cinema, but of a nation that maintains a potent cultural force more than 30 years after its dissolution.  

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February 16th: The link above leads to Portuguese-language information about the 27th edition of the Mutual Films Session, co-curated and organized by me and Mariana Shellard, which will take place between February 18th and 23rd at the São Paulo-based unit of the Instituto Moreira Salles.

The event places into dialogue two sides of the American movie star Sterling Hayden (1916-1986), who is known today for a small but potent body of film work realized between the 1950s and 1970s that includes appearances as the emotional center of John Huston’s crime-themed classic The Asphalt Jungle, vital cogs in the ensembles of two great Stanley Kubrick films (The Killing and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb), and a moving autobiographical supporting role in Robert Altman’s revisionist noir film The Long Goodbye. He was also celebrated in his time as a political actor, though not at all to his liking, as Hayden’s box office success was generated in good part by his willingness under pressure to appear in 1951 as a “friendly witness” before the House Un-American Activities Committee and denounce friends and colleagues as Communists. Hayden recounts in his 1963 autobiography Wanderer that he despised himself for his actions and how he benefited from them. He became, in fact, one of the few “friendly witnesses” to denounce the witch hunts unequivocally and expose their proper darkness within the context of American history.

Hayden’s most famous film is likely the brightly colored 1954 Western Johnny Guitar, which will screen at IMS in a 4K restoration with a 1.66:1 aspect ratio (in contrast to the Academy aspect ratio within which the film has long been presented). Hayden plays the titular vagrant cowboy, who encounters a former love (Vienna, played by Joan Crawford) and must decide whether to save her from unjust persecution. The film was directed by the Communist sympathizer Nicholas Ray (1911-1979) and its screenplay was authored largely by Philip Yordan, who frequently acted as a “front” for Blacklisted writers. Today the film rings clearly as a protest against the mass hysterics of postwar American society; in interviews given at the time of its release and for years afterwards, however, Hayden himself said that he didn’t understand what Johnny Guitar was about or what he was supposed to be doing in it.

One such interview was given in 1982 to a German film crew, at a moment when Hayden was aboard his houseboat in Besançon, France and adrift in an alcoholic stupor while struggling to write a new book. The result of the week-long encounter between Hayden and the documentary filmmakers Wolf-Eckart Bühler (1945-2020) and Manfred Blank (born in 1949) is the 1983 portrait film Pharos of Chaos, which will screen at IMS in a 2K restoration made from the film’s original 16mm camera negatives. Hayden here possesses a different kind of courage from that of the lead male character in Johnny Guitar, as the former gunman traversing a landscape now appears as a lost soul struggling forcefully to stay afloat.

The February 18th screening of Johnny Guitar will be presented by the Brazilian critic and curator Paulo Santos Lima, who is responsible for articles, courses, and film series devoted to authorial studies of Hollywood stars including Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis, Paul Newman, and Al Pacino. The series page on the Mutual Films website includes as supplemental materials a new translation into Portuguese of material about Johnny Guitar taken from the French film historian Bernard Eisenschitz’s commanding Nicholas Ray biography Nicholas Ray: An American Journey (whose English-language translation was made by Tom Milne), as well as a discussion about the making of Pharos of Chaos.