Linduarte Noronha

Linduarte Noronha was a reporter and film critic before venturing into documentary film. His first short film, "Aruanda" (1960), was an adaptation of one of his newspaper articles. Brazilian film would never be the same.

"Aruanda" is as important for modern Brazilian cinema as "Bagaceira", written by José Américo de Almeida, also born in Paraíba, for our literary modernism. The Northeastern reality, its myths, textures, roughness, settings and characters opened way – in 1960 as in 1928, in film and as in books.

"Aruanda", teaches Noronha, means "promised land". The film shows the foundation of a "quilombo", a community of fugitive slaves in Serra do Talhado and revisits the region nearly a century after, through a peasant family who subsists on cotton planted by the men and pottery, the women's work.

A then young critic from Bahia called Glauber Rocha compared him to a Rossellini of the dawn of neo-realism. Jean-Claude Bernardet praises him as "a document and an interpretation of reality, simultaneously". In the following decade, Cinema Novo and the Brazilian documentary would apply his teachings.

"Aruanda" gave origin to a documentary school in Paraíba, made up mostly of Noronha's crew mates: Vladimir Carvalho, João Ramiro Mello, Rucker Vieira. Linduarte Noronha himself would make only two more movies: the short "Northeastern Cashew Tree" and, in the 70's, the feature "The Death Pay Roll", after a frustrated attempt to adapt, of course, "A Bagaceira".

On the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the article that gave origin to "Aruanda" (The Potters of Serra do Talhado Spring, 1958), It's All True celebrates Linduarte Noronha's innovating contribution. This cycle puts together films he directed himself, his portrait made by another master of Brazilian documentary film (Geraldo Sarno), two works that contextualize Paraíba in the year he was born (1930) and two shorts that are essential for the Paraíba school. The strength of this movement is reaffirmed by the hors-concours screening of the new documentary directed by Vladimir Carvalho, "Zé Lins's Sugar Cane Mills", a moving portrait of Paraíba-born writer José Lins do Rego (1901-1957).

AMIR LABAKI