Bye Bye Brazil (Bye Bye Brasil) is screening as part of the retrospective celebrating LC Barreto: 60 Years of Brazilian Film Production. The retrospective is screening at The Garden Cinema and the ICA from 25 April- 10 May, in partnership with Instituto Rouanet and the Embassy of Brazil in London.
Carlos Diegues’ rollicking road movie follows a ragtag troupe of musicians, magicians and rumba queens across a country on the cusp of change. This Cinema Novo classic is an ardent love letter to the sights and sounds of Brazil—with music by Chico Buarque!
Cinema Novo godfather Carlos Diegues directed films that were an integral part of the cultural and sociopolitical struggles facing Brazil in the 1960s, particularly the country’s underexplored Afro-Brazilian heritage. One of his most essential works, Bye Bye Brazil concerns a motley crew of traveling performers (led by José Wilker, the devilish spirit of Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands) entertaining various audiences across Brazil’s northwestern Amazonian landscape. Accordionist Ciço (Fábio Júnior) and his wife Dasdô (Zaira Zambelli) join the rollicking caravan, leading to a string of adventures and good songs. Diegues’s low-key road movie-cum-musical captures the country’s changing times—both the myth and the reality of Brazil’s underdevelopment—with documentary-like specificity. Upon its release, Vincent Canby in The New York Times called it “a psychological inventory of a country on the verge of extraordinary economic and industrial development, a travelogue through a nation that doesn’t yet exist.'
Restoration courtesy of L.C. Barreto Produções Cinematográficas.
