Re(inventing) vision

A trained economist, president of the Moreira Salles Institute (a cultural organization created by his father Walter Moreira Salles), founder of the magazine Piauí, as well as being a professor, screenwriter, editor and producer, the Brazilian filmmaker João Moreira Salles, began his film career in 1985 through his brother, the director Walter Salles, who asked him for help on one of his projects. Since then, his approach to filmmaking has always stemmed from one core concern: reinventing forms, playing with points of view to swap and disrupt them, and revising ways of narrating... in short: expanding on the possibilities of the language of film and its capacity for reflection.

As a special guest of DocumentaMadrid, three fundamental titles from his filmography will be screened. The first, Entreatos (2004) takes us backstage during the final phase of the political campaign leading up to Lula da Silva's presidency in 2002. Pure observations of conversations, meetings and intimate family moments showing a Lula at his most relaxed and playful, as well as the political 'character' and actor, perfectly aware of the power of the image, while also serving as an exceptional record of that historical moment. Santiago (2007), on its part, proves to be a complex, reflexive film that starts out from some images the filmmaker shot in the past in order to make a family film about the butler in his childhood home. The footage ends up becoming an exciting meta-discursive game about filmmaking's capacity for representation. On its part, No intenso agora (2017), as a film-essay, starts with the discovery of amateur footage shot in China during the Cultural Revolution that leads to a review of the political situation in 1968 in France, Czechoslovakia and Brazil, in addition to a new reflection on the status of images. On May 10, coinciding with the most important anniversary commemorating 'May '68, a special session of this film will be held.

You will also get the chance to see Últimas conversas (2015), a posthumous film by Eduardo Coutinho that the filmmaker finished editing after his death. Considered by Moreira Salles as a major referential figure, he and Coutinho maintained not only an intense friendship, but also a fruitful professional relationship as a producer. On basis of this profound mutual knowledge, João Moreira Salles will lead a Master Class on the figure and work of the Brazilian master.

Jara Yáñez