The Norman MacColl Symposium
Building Films: Conversations with Brazilian Filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho
Saturday 25 November, 2017 (2- 7pm)
Hailed as one of Latin America’s most important filmmakers of the last 10 years, Kleber Mendonça Filho is coming to Cambridge.
Born in the Northeast of Brazil, Mendonça Filho studied journalism and has worked extensively as a film critic as well as a film programmer. In the 1990s he made documentaries, experimental films and fiction as a videomaker, winning numerous awards. His more recent feature length films have devotedly recorded the workings of his hometown Recife. His debut fiction film Neighbouring Sounds (2012) was an ingeniously crafted and manic meditation on surveillance and paranoia, set in a wealthy apartment block of Recife that served as a microcosm of the country through the anxieties that permeated it. With his more recent film Aquarius (2016), the filmmaker reaffirms his desire to address the contemporary tensions of Brazil, but does not ascribe explicit political ambitions to his film. Rather, he seems to be one of those artists primarily drawn to story and character, whose uncompromising humanism makes their work inherently political today.
During his time at Cambridge (November 21-25), the Cambridge Arts Picture House will screen his two feature films Neighbouring Sounds (2012) and Aquarius (2016), with each screening followed by a Q and A with the director. Mendonça Filho will also meet with students and will participate in The Norman MacColl Public Symposium “Building Films: Conversations with Brazilian Filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho” on his work with leading film scholars on 25 November. The Symposium is organized by Maite Conde in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, in conjunction with the Norman MacColl Lecture 2017 and with the kind collaboration of the Centre for Latin American Studies.
Mendonça Filho’s time in Cambridge offers our students and the wider University the opportunity to engage at close range with a working filmmaker of the highest calibre. It brings to our community of film scholars and students of cinema the chance to think about film from the point of view of a film artists and presents a vital opportunity to see how practice and theory engage with each other while meeting one of the most interesting and people working in Latin American and world cinema.