Rio International Film Festival 2008

The 10th Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival (Festival do Rio) took place from Thursday 25 September through Thursday 9 October 2008. Screening around 350 films from 60 countries at 30 venues across the city, Festival do Rio was headquartered for the first time in the historic heart of Rio de Janeiro at the Centro Cultural da Ação da Cidadania in the port district.

Festival do Rio opened with the Latin American premiere of Bruno Barreto’s drama Última Parada 174 (Last Stop 174). The film was selected to represent Brazil in the Foreign Language Film category at the 81st Academy Awards, a category its director received an Academy Award nomination for in 1997 for O Que e Isso Companheiro? (Four Days In September).

The closing gala screening, on Wednesday 8 October, was the Latin American premiere of Vicente Amorim’s Good, a UK-German co-production that stars Viggo Mortensen. Amorim and Mortensen were on hand to present the film.

Première Brasil: The Best of Brazil

Première Brasil, which has as its festival home the historic Odeon Petrobras and Palácio cinemas in downtown Rio de Janeiro, is the competitive heart of Festival do Rio and the best annual global showcase of contemporary Brazilian cinema. In 2008 Première Brasil screened 64 new Brazilian works. The films in Première Brasil are presented in three programs: features, documentaries and shorts, and includes films in competition and hors concours.

Première Brasil is the only competitive section of Festival do Rio with jury awards presented on the festival's closing night. Three highly prized audience awards are also bestowed on the best Brazilian feature film, best documentary and best short film. In 2008 the competition included eight feature films, ten feature length documentaries (nine of which were having their world premieres), ten short fiction films and five documentary shorts.

The Première Brasil class of 2008 consisted of:

Première Brasil: Fiction

• Apenas O Fim (That’s It) - Matheus Souza
• Feliz Natal (December) - Selton Mello
• A Festa da Menina Morta (The Dead Girl's Feast) - Matheus Nachtergaele
• Juventude (Youth) - Domingos Oliveira
• Rinha (La Riña) - Marcelo Galvão
• Se Nada Mais Der Certo (Should Nothing Else Work Out) - José Eduardo Belmonte
• Verônica (Veronica) - Maurício Farias
• Vingança (Retribution) - Paulo Pons

Première Brasil: Documentaries

• Cantoras do Radio (Radio Singers) - Gil Baroni and Marcos Avellar
• Cinderelas, Lobos e um Príncipe Encantado (Cinderellas, Wolves and Prince Charming) - Joel Zito Araújo
• Contratempo (Contretemps) - Malu Mader & Mini Kerti
• Estrada Real da Cachaça (Royal Road of Cachaça) - Pedro Urano
• Jards Macalé - Um Morcego na Porta Principal (Jards) - Marco Abujamra
• Loki – Arnaldo Baptista - Paulo Henrique Fontenelle
• Morrinho - Deus sabe tudo mas não é X9 /(Morrinho - God Knows Everything But Is Not a Delator) - Fabio Gavião & Markão Oliveira
• Palavra (en)cantada (The Enchanted Word) - Helena Solberg
• Sentidos à flor da pele (Skin Feelings) – Evaldo Mocarzel
• Titãs - A vida até parece uma festa (Titãs - Life is Like a Party) - Branco Mello & Oscar Rodrigues Alves.

The official jury was composed of Brazilian actress Camila Pitanga, Chilean born / Brazilian based director and writer Jorge Duran, Argentine producer Lita Stantie, and German director and actor Wieland Speck, who since 1992 has been in charge of programming the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival.

In 2008 the festival’s official jury chose José Eduardo Belmonte’s Se Nada Mais Der Certo (Should Nothing Else Work Out) as the best film and Pedro Urano’s Estrada Real da Cachaça (Royal Road of Cachaça) as best documentary.

The public voted for Matheus Souza’s Apenas O Fim (That’s It) as the festival’s best film in Première Brasil; Paulo Henrique Fontenelle’s Loki – Arnaldo Baptista as the best documentary; and André Rangel e Marcos Negrão’s Urubus têm asas as best short. The audience voted the best film in Mostra Geração (Generation Sidebar) to be Indian director Aamin Khan’s Taare Zameen Par (Stars On Earth).

FIPRESCI gave its prize for the best Latin American Film in the festival to Argentine director Lucrecia Martel’s La Mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman).

The full lists of the official jury prizes for 2008 were:

Best fiction: Se Nada Mais Der Certo (Should Nothing Else Work Out) - José Eduardo Belmonte
Best documentary: Estrada Real da Cachaça (Royal Road of Cachaça) - Pedro Urano
Best director (fiction): Matheus Nachtergaele - A Festa da Menina Morta (The Dead Girl's Feast)
Best director (documentary): Helena Solberg - Palavra (en)cantada (The Enchanted Word)
Best actor: Daniel de Oliveira - A Festa da Menina Morta (The Dead Girl's Feast)
Best actress: Caroline Abras - Se Nada Mais Der Certo (Should Nothing Else Work Out)
Best short (fiction): Blackout - Daniel Rezende
Best short (documentary): 69 – Praça da Luz - Carolina Markowicz, Joana Galvão
Special Jury Award: Jards Macalé - Um Morcego na Porta Principal (Jards) - Marco Abujamra
Honourable Mention: Apenas O Fim (That’s It) - Matheus Souza

As well as the festival trophy (Troféu Redentor) the winning films at Festival do Rio in Première Brasil get to take home:

Best Film – Official Jury (Se Nada Mais Der Certo (Should Nothing Else Work Out)
QUANTA Prize R$ 10.000,00 in equipment
TELE IMAGE Prize - 60 hours of telecine off line
NIELSEN EDI Prize - International Tracking Report (Brasil + two countries)

Best Documentary – Official Jury (Estrada Real da Cachaça (Royal Road of Cachaça)
QUANTA Prize - R$ 6.000,00 in equipment
TELEIMAGE – 8 hours tape to tape

Best Shorts – Official Jury (Blackout & 69 – Praça da Luz)
QUANTA Prize - R$ 4.000,00 in equipment
TELE IMAGE Prize – 6 hours telecine off line and 40 hours sound editing
LINK DIGITAL Prize - Transfer up to 15 minutes
DOLBY Prize - Dolby 5.1 licence
CTAV Prize – New subtitled print (in film or digital)

Best Film – Audience Award (Apenas O Fim (That’s It)
PROJETA BRASIL CINEMARK Prize, R$ 20.000,00 cash prize
NIELSEN EDI Prize - International Tracking Report (Brazil + two countries)

Best Documentary – Audience Award (Loki – Arnaldo Baptista)
GLOBO FILMES Prize - R$ 100.000,00 in media on TV Globo
PROJETA BRASIL CINEMARK Prize - R$ 10.000,00 cash prize

Rio’s International Reach

For the past decade Festival do Rio has been known for bringing the best of international cinema to Brazil, and 2008 was no exception with more than 60 countries represented across the festival program by nearly 300 new or historically important films.

From its Latin American neighbours, the festival offered audiences Première Latina with 20 films from the region receiving their Brazilian premiere.

The bulk of the international programming screened in:

• World Panorama
• Expectations
• Limits & Frontiers
• Generation
• Cinema Treasures
• Dox
• Midnight Movies / Midnight Songs
• Gay World
• Pocket Films

Each year the festival chooses to shine the spotlight on one particular country’s filmmakers. In 2008 the country in focus was the United Kingdom, a country that was celebrating 200 years of uninterrupted trade with Brazil.

21 new and recent UK productions screened during the festival as part of the UK Focus. There was also a separate sidebar of nine films directed by the late Derek Jarman that were complimented by a screening of Isaac Julien’s documentary Derek.

The festival also programmed a number of international sidebars, including sections dedicated to the Taviani bothers (Paolo Taviani was present at the festival); the Mexican director, Arturo Ripstein (who received a special FIPRESCI award as “Latin American of the Year”); Italian Divas; and a special sidebar that marked the centenary of Japanese immigration to Brazil which included a selection of recent works from director Masahiro Kobayashi who presented five of his movies at the festival.

Festival do Rio, which first took place in 1999 as a result of the merger of Brazil’s two largest film events, Rio Cine Festival (founded in 1984) and Mostra Banco Nacional do Cinema (founded in 1988), is Brazil and South America's largest film festival and industry event.

RioMarket: Industry Focus

While a large part of the festival is targeted towards the resident Brazilian public, Festival do Rio also has a very strong industry section, Rio Market (www.riomarket.com.br), with seminars, Master Classes, one-to-one scheduled meetings, and networking events covering both film, home entertainment and television.

Workshops included screenwriting, presented by Peter Lliff (Point Blank, Patriot Games and Under Suspicion); shooting in 3-D, given by Peter Anderson, the director of photography for U2 3D; and acting, given by Robert Castle.

New for 2008 was the 1st Annual Latin American Feature Film Project. The project is a result of the partnership between Festival do Rio and Steve Solot’s Latin American Training Center and aims in the coming years to discover new talent while creating business opportunities that contribute to the growth of the Latin American film industry.

A total of eleven projects, selected from across Latin America, gave a pitch to a group of industry professionals. The winning project was Susana Campos’ S.A.A.R.A – São Jorge e o Passaro Celestial, from Brazil’s Pindorama Filmes. The winning project won a trip to Spain for business discussions with potential European investors and partners that was offered by the Fundación de Investigación Audiovisual (FIA) and Red Idea of Spain. In second place was another Brazilian project, Cecília Amado’s Capitães de Areia from Ondamax Film. This project won US$8,000 from the University of Miami.

RioMarket took place from 26 September to 6 October with the majority of industry events centered on the Centro Cultural da Ação da Cidadania.

Catching Up On Festival do Rio 2008
If you are trying to catch up on what has happened during the 2008 Festival do Rio you can find the daily news from the festival archived in the Festival Diary to the left. There is also a good selection of photos at Festival Photos as a reminder and “lembrança” of the festival and its activities.