#3: Distribution of Brazilian Cinema
This is Film! #3: Distribution of Brazilian Cinema
This is Film! welcomes archivist Laura Batitucci of Cinelimite, a Brazilian organisation devoted to digitising and exhibiting films existing at the margins of Brazilian film history. She will discuss the important work Cinelimite does in “unearthing” orphan films.
Founded in 2020 as an online platform with texts and video essays on Brazilian archival cinema, Cinelimite later launched the Brazilian Film Digitisation Initiative, through which they began digitising films all over the country. In 2023, they organised the Travelling Digitisation project, travelling through different regions of Brazil to digitise more than 300 films that would normally have limited access to scanning and digitisations services, using a portable Super 8 and 8mm scanner and portable workstation.
In their restoration and distribution work, Cinelimite prioritises queer cinema, works by women, black and indigenous filmmakers, as well as domestic and non-commercial films. In other words, films that have historically been neglected by the canons, often works that have been rarely seen, or have nearly gone lost. These works are brought to new audiences by distributing them to festivals, archives, and cultural institutions in Brazil and internationally.
The session will be moderated by Luna Hupperetz, film curator and PhD-student at the University of Amsterdam specialising in critical audiovisual heritage, and will be paired with a screening of a selection of experimental Brazilian short films restored by Cinelimite, mostly from the 1970s and 1980s.
Guest
Laura Batitucci is an archivist and film technician. She currently works as a film restoration technician at the National Archive of the Moving Image (ANIM) of the Cinemateca Portuguesa in Lisbon. She is the executive director of Cinelimite, a non-profit organisation dedicated to exhibiting, distributing, and digitising Brazilian repertory cinema, with a focus on orphan films, home movies, and non-commercial films.
Programme
Vã-pirações (Arnaldo Albuquerque, BR 1985, 4’)
Vã-pirações (Vampire Delusions) follows a vampire who wanders through the city in search of blood while facing the everyday violence heightened by the news. A satire focusing on the spectecularisation of violence and the rise of mass culture at the end of the dictatorship.
Viva o outro mundo (Katia Mesel, BR 1972, 6’)
One of the first films by Katia Mesel, who would later become a renowned documentary filmmaker, was entirely shot on Super 8 in the 1970s. The passing years have left visible scars on the film material, but this wear becomes part of the film’s own language. The deterioration seeps into the dreamlike atmosphere of the film, and we find ourselves in another world, the marginal world of Carnival, where no rules apply.
O lento, seguro, gradual e relativo strip-tease do zé fusquinha (Amin Stepple, BR 1978, 3’)
The year is 1978, and Brazilian military dictator Ernesto Geisel announces that the end of the dictatorship will be a slow, gradual, and safe beginning for the country. For Stepple, this was the final straw. Fed up, he picked up his camera and made this humorous and radical short film.
Alto nível baixo (Jomard Muniz de Britto, BR 1977, 7’)
Through a play between colour and black and white, high and low angle shots, and empty and crowded space, Muniz de Britto shows the stark contrasts of social inequality in Recife, a major city in northeastern Brazil.
Coração materno (Haroldo Barradas, BR 1974, 15’)
In 1974, Arnaldo Albuquerque, Edmar Oliveira, and Durvalino Couto made a film titled Mother’s Heart, based on a popular 1950s song about a reckless promise made by a love-struck man: to give his beloved the heart of his own mother as proof of his devotion. After one private screening, the film was destroyed by the family’s dog, leaving behind only a few fragments. Later that year, Haroldo Barradas decided to reshoot the entire film with a new cast, incorporating the fragments left behind. The result is this “film within a film” that tells a story marked by loss, reconstruction, and affection.
Histerias (Inês Castilho, BR 1985, 17’)
Interspersed with documentation of dancer Juliana Carneiro da Cunha’s "Possession" performance, which draws from Christian mysticism, in the filmmaker’s words, this experimental short is about “the psychic suffering of women in a patriarchal society”. It takes the viewer on a disorienting journey through the Catholic Church, repressed sexuality, racial violence perpetrated by white women, maternal fatigue and male chauvinism.
This is part of
Details
Production year
2026
Length
150 min.
Event language
English
Country
NL
Part of
This is Film! 2026
This is Film! Film Heritage in Practice is an annual public lecture series in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam devoted to notable projects in the fields of film restoration and film heritage, with international guest speakers and film screenings.
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