Press Releases

    Presentation

    Opening Sessions
    SP / RJ

    Tribute

    International Competition

    Brazilian Competition

    The State of Things

    Retrospectives
    International / Brazilian

    Special Programs

    Extra Activities

    Schedule
    SP / RJ

    Screening Rooms

    Jury and Awards

    Credits

    Team

    Where You Can Find
        Our Guests


    Regulation

    Last Edition


Brazilian Retrospective
Geraldo Sarno





Biography

Geraldo Sarno
(1938)

Bahia's Geraldo Sarno is a benchmark for the modern Brazilian documentary. When he was studying Law at the Federal University of Bahia, in the early '60s, he became involved with the People's Center for Culture (CPC) when it was most active. At that time, he had some of his first cinema experiences, with Orlando Senna and Valdemar Lima: they were films about peasants and the rural revolution, blending documentary and fiction, and done with 16mm, B&W, reversible, negative film, developed at home and edited manually, like "A Work Bee in Novo Sol", which was confiscated and destroyed with other belongings of the CPC during the post-'64 repression.

After a year at the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry, he joined a group that would become known as the "Farkas Caravan", which was responsible for a series of classics of Brazilian documentary films, and he did his first solo work: "Viramundo". His next films were deeply marked by the topics touched on in this work. The relationship of the back country people with this work can be seen in "Long Live Cariri!", "Monday" and "The Earth is Burning". The religious manifestations, portrayed as alienating influences in the Pentecostal sequence in "Viramundo", reappears from another perspective in "Long Live Cariri!" (the myth of Father Cícero), in "Iaô" (from the Afro-Brazilian cults, as a symbol of the resistance of the oppressed) or in "God is a fire" (the crisis of Catholicism, as a portrayal of the crisis of the Latin American leftist movements). Standing out in all of his works is the deep link with popular culture.

In the '90s, he dedicated himself to educational projects, essays and works in the editorial area - and he was one of the editors of Cinemais Magazine. In 1999, he prepared the series "The Language of the Cinema", and began to produce the first eight videos dedicated to the creative process of Brazilian moviemakers - six of which will be shown in special sessions in this edition of the International Documentary Festival.