Brazil’s It’s All True International Documentary Film Festival celebrates its 20th anniversary beginning tomorrow, Thursday, April 9 with a screening of the late Eduardo Coutinho’s LAST CONVERSATIONS. The festival will run through Sunday, April 19 in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, while tours will continue in other cities into May and June. More than 40 new features will screen, with shorts and retrospectives bringing the total lineup to over 100 films.
Seven local films vie for recognition in the Brazilian Feature and Medium-Length Competition. Among these, the most intriguing are José Joffily and Pedro Rossi’s THE WAY BACK (pictured), which follows two Brazilian expatriates as they try to return to their native home; and Boca Migotto’s FILM ABOUT BOM FIM, a portrait of the Porto Alegre neighborhood that became the hub of pivotal cultural activism in the 1960s and 1970s.
Most of the dozen titles in the International Feature and Medium-Length Competition have been covered here already. The remainder include: Pablo Martínez Pessi’s YOUR PARENTS WILL COME BACK, about an early 1980s trip to Uruguay by the children of political exiles; and Mirko Stopar’s NITRATE FLAMES (pictured), which traces the real life story of the protagonist of Carl Theodore Dreyer’s THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC.
Non-competitive strands include The State of Things, which include titles like LOADER 1118, Eduardo Consonni and Rodrigo T Marques’ portrait of a freight loader, and DREAM RAIL, Pedro von Krüger’s meditation on Brazil’s bygone train stations; a Latin American Showcase, featuring films such as Juan Pablo Ríos’ RETURN, about a group of Colombian siblings who left their mountain town after a tragedy; and Special Programs, including Lucia Murat and Rodrigo Hinrichsen’s THE NATION THAT DIDN’T WAIT FOR GOD (pictured), in which the filmmakers return to the indigenous subjects of a previous film to see what changes modernization have wrought in the intervening quarter century.
what (not) to doc 