You could not miss the Stella Cinema last night. The queue of people waiting to go in stretched down Rathmines Road.
This crowd was for the opening night for the first year of the Brazilian Film Festival in Ireland, which I had the honour of attending. Such was the excitement, that during the wine reception, the elegant mirrors of the front room soon resembled marble from the breath of so many voices. So it’s no surprise the festival is already sold out in its entirety, an impressive achievement for the director and curator, Ingrid Machado dos Reis.
Machado is also the head of the pop-up art/house cinema, Solax Film Club. Sofia Steiner Garro, one of the festival coordinators and part of the staff at Solax, was overjoyed and surprised with this turnout. “It’s really moving to see how many people came tonight, to support both art and Brazilian culture, especially with the cultural rollercoaster that is Ireland”.
BFFI is showing five more films from September 24ᵗʰ to 27ᵗʰ. Machado explained they wanted to screen films with “bite”, and that the “stranger they were, the better”.
‘Strange’ certainly describes the festival’s opening film, Pequenas Criatures (Little Creatures), by Anne Pinheiro Guimarães. It is set in Brasília in 1986, and anyone familiar with Brazilian cultural history might guess the nature of the film’s sincerely bizarre and ambiguous ending.
Machado explains it was chosen as the opener because its story about “finding beauty in unexpected places” is relevant to the “hopeless times of now”. These “hopeless” times are “homeless” times for many, with the mass amount of refugees fleeing from countries such as Palestine, Ukraine and Syria. Machado and her team’s celebration of the ability of film to “express the ways we miss home in ways words cannot” is a painfully relevant message.
Machado also brought politics to the forefront last night when she urged the Brazilian citizens sitting in the audience to post their votes home for the upcoming presidential election. This election will take place on October 4ᵗʰ, between the current left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and his right-wing rival, Flávio Bolsonaro.
Our ties and responsibilities to our countries can both lift us up and weigh us down, which BFFI poignantly recognises. For everybody who knows the experience of “carrying a country in your pocket”, as Machado intimately does, this is not a festival to skip out on in upcoming years.
