Aaron Cutler

  • Gabriela Golder, Conversation Piece, 2012, HD, color, sound, 19 minutes.
    film May 30, 2013

    The Art of Conversation

    “THIS FILM WAS MADE for very little money, with very few people,” the great Brazilian filmmaker Júlio Bressane told his mainly Argentine audience. He paused. “And it was never released. Nobody saw it. There would be three people at the beginning, and they would all run away before the film was over. This room right now has more people than have ever seen it before. So thank you very much for coming, I hope you enjoy it, and we can have a conversation with whoever is still here at the end.”

    Seventeen of Bressane’s films (roughly half his output) screened during the fifteenth edition of the Buenos

  • Amy Seimetz, Sun Don’t Shine, 2012, color, 82 minutes.
    film September 12, 2012

    This American Life

    JOSH AND BENNIE SAFDIE’S short film The Black Balloon (2011), inspired by Albert Lamorisse’s immortal children’s work The Red Balloon (1963), begins as a harried balloon man accidentally releases an array of brightly-hued delights into the sky. While most of the balloons fly high up, a lone black one floats back down over a trash heap, a highway, and then Times Square. It accompanies a little girl along an urban sidewalk, joins a homeless bum who has been turned away from a restaurant, and hovers between the members of a bickering couple. (“Go back to your little cubicle with the robots up

  • Kiko Goifman and Claudia Priscilla, Olhe pra mim de novo (Look at Me Again), 2011, color film, 77 minutes.
    film July 12, 2012

    Dreams of Life

    A PROBLEM WITH NATION-THEMED PROGRAMMING is that it presumes a national character. In the case of Brazil, whose multiethnic population of two hundred million lives across a wide and diverse array of terrains, any summary of that character will always be incomplete. The twelfth edition of “Premiere Brazil!,” the Museum of Modern Art’s annual festival of new Brazilian films receiving their United States premieres (organized in collaboration with the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival), gives a sampler of Brazilian life and art that goes far beyond the stereotypical images of beaches, drugs,

  • Marcel Lozinski, Tonia and Her Children, 2011, still from a color video, 57 minutes.
    film May 07, 2012

    Present Past Present

    “THE XINGU WILL NEVER BE BOUGHT.” In recent months the Amazon’s Xingu River has been encroached upon by government development, but Megaron Txucarramãe, an important spokesperson for the Kayapó Indians, vowed his people wouldn’t leave their land. His speech preceded a São Paulo screening of Daniel Santiago’s Heart of Brazil (2011), a sweetly character-driven film in which two older men embark on a voyage they took fifty years prior into the Amazon. Heart played during the seventeenth It’s All True (IAT) documentary festival, which ran in four Brazilian cities. A scene between one of the men and

  • Left: Eduardo Coutinho, Twenty Years Later, 1984, still from a black-and-white and color film in 16 mm, 119 minutes. Right: Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Once upon a Time in Anatolia, 2010, still from a color film in 35 mm, 150 minutes.
    film December 08, 2011

    Now and Then

    THE DIALECTIC OF OLD AND NEW ruled this year’s São Paulo International Film Festival, the first without founder and director Leon Cakoff, who died of melanoma complications the week before its opening. One sensed the present addressing the past and future simultaneously. This feeling was even built into the programming. The opening was a twin bill: the Dardenne brothers’ new film The Kid with a Bike and a restoration of the hand-tinted version of Méliès’s 1902 film A Trip to the Moon. On every day following, one could watch repertory in the same rooms as more recent work, including retrospectives