Iracema, All Is Brazil

One of the landmarks of Brazilian cinema and a major influence on generations of filmmakers, Iracema’s fusion of fiction and documentary is still exhilarating for contemporary audiences. Iracema (an anagram of “America”) is the tragic story of a young teenager from the Amazon (played by nonprofessional actor Edna de Cássia) who heads out to the big city. There she meets a truck driver (played by the professional actor Paulo César Peréio), who takes her on a road trip across the under-construction Trans-Amazon Highway. Against the backdrop of the taming of the Amazon, fiction filmmaking becomes inseparably interwoven with documentary in an allegory of Brazilian destiny, progress, and identity. (90 mins., 35mm)

All Is Brazil is part visual essay and part freeform fantasia centered on Orson Welles’s fascinating 1942 trip to Brazil. Against a dizzying array of imagery, the film chronicles all aspects of Welles’s trip and encounters with Brazilian culture, from the US government using him and his radio show as an ambassador for its “Good Neighbor” policy to the aborted film, It’s All True, that Welles started shooting in Brazil. Rogério Sganzerla (The Red Light Bandit) is one of the key figures of the experimental, underground Cinema Marginal movement, and in All Is Brazil he brings his radical techniques to turn this film about Welles into a speculation on Brazilian identity. (82 mins., 35mm)