Brazilian Immigrant Cinema is a series that showcases contemporary Brazilian filmmakers who live and work from within the diaspora. Our framework is to approach cinema through the immigrant lens by embracing accents, neologisms, and code-switches. We pair multilingual stories in dialogue with each other, and invite audiences to consider multiple cinematic languages in the same film program.
For its inaugural volume, we are presenting two films coming from a specific city in the United States: Los Angeles. The city-symphony OS ANGELINOS (João Vieira, Syl Sutton) and the film-correspondence SWING AND SWAY (Chica Barbosa, Fernanda Pessoa) are co-directions that build their narrative through letters. In Os Angelinos, LA is the single recipient of the open-letter collectively written by angeleno immigrants in their own mother languages; while in Swing and Sway the Californian metropolis converses with São Paulo in a filmic mail exchange between co-directors Chica and Fernanda. Together, both films pair multilingual stories in dialogue with each other, thus inviting audiences to experience various cinematic languages in the same film program.
We set ourselves to visually explore diasporic experiences in California and documented a specific moment in time: the Los Angeles post covid-19 lockdown living through George Floyd’s summer. Soon after, the city would endure yet another presidential election cycle, carrying yet another campaign promise for immigration rights that ultimately was never fulfilled.
Our first screening will happen at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle on March 8th at 6 pm. Sponsored by Interbay Cinema Society, this timely program also known as Cinema Imigrante Brasileiro, has been structured as a fundraiser for immigrant rights advocacy.
Cinema & Direct Action
We believe in the power of cinema as an agent for social change. The zeitgeist of our programming is to promote contemporary immigrant cinema and support immigrant communities across diasporas through direct action.
For this screening we want to strengthen the efforts of one grassroot organization that is doing the work the US government refuses to do: provide humanitarian and financial aid to immigrant day laborers, undocumented workers, and mixed-status families impacted by the Los Angeles wildfires. In the aftermath of the regional disaster, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network rapidly mobilized to support immigrant communities impacted by the Eaton Fire to find safety and comfort.
Given the advance of Donald Trump’s xenophobic agenda through recent ICE’s raids in the country’s largest cities, the deportation flights to across the globe, and the fear mongering state that has been installed, it is extremely difficult for undocumented and mixed-status folks to receive natural disaster reconstruction assistance through any governmental assistance program.
You can support the crucial work of the NDLON by donating to their Immigrant Fire Relief Fund here.
Os Angelinos
OS ANGELINOS investigates the fluxes of an empty metropolis. Structured as a multilingual open letter to the city of Los Angeles, the film’s narrative is fluid. We take Los Angeles as our protagonist, and move from language to language, neighborhood to neighborhood, story to story, following no chronologic or geographic order. We visit seven LA county regions and document how they interconnect with the city’s iconic highway system. At each location, we look for city escapes, construction sites, infrastructure complexes, buildings, houses, parks, monuments, and freeways that tell stories of immigrant resistance, existence, and resilience.
Swing and Sway
The year in which everything radically changed, where real and invisible borders took on another dimension, is the root of a filmic provocation. Two girlfriends, separated by the North and South hemispheres of America, intend to dance in the tumult of images, violence, frustrations and desires. They do it through a game where registering themselves and the women around them enables a dialogue that becomes real and vivid, as an encounter and a hug determined to resist the distance.
