José Padilha Premieres New Film in New York City

After winning the main prize (The Golden Bear) at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, Padilha is releasing a film that many have called the antithesis of The Elite Squad. Leslie Felperin, a reviewer from the Hollywood trade Variety, opened her review of the film by saying that Garapa is “as austere and protractedly paced as The Elite Squad was combustible and frenetic.”

An exploration of the experience of hunger through the lives of three families living below the poverty line in Brazil, Garapa was shot entirely in black-and-white, hand-held Super 16mm.

New York audiences will have four chances to see this film in New York theatres, starting this coming Saturday, on April 25. BrazilNYC will be running its review of the film early next week, once we have a chance to see it for ourselves.

GARAPA (feature documentary).
Director: José Padilha. 106 min., North American Premiere.

Director José Padilha (Bus 174) follows up his Golden Bear-winning Elite Squad with this austere, unflinching examination of the realities of chronic hunger for three Brazilian families. At once intimate and universal, Padilha’s hauntingly visual film humanizes the enormity of the global hunger crisis.

Here is a list of other Brazilian films playing at the 2009 edition of the Tribeca Film Festival:

KOGI – Short documentary.
Director: Paula Gaitán. 13 min., World Premiere.

For the KOGI Indians, there is a great mirror that divides two worlds, the perceptual and the sensory. The abstract world of meanings is not what we sensorially perceive, but the world of what the KOGI call “aluna.” This world is what gives meaning to the destiny of life. Paula Gaitan attended the festival last year for her film Days in Sintra.

ONLY WHEN I DANCE – Feature documentary.
Director: Beadie Finzie. 78 minutes, World Premiere.

Two teenage ballet dancers from the working-class favelas of Rio are determined to dance their way to a better life, but to do so they must grow up against harsh prejudice, doubt, and some of the best dancers in the world. This inspiring doc trails their path to beat the odds and follow their dream of making it in the elite world of professional ballet.

ALMOST EVERYDAY (Quase Todo Dia) – Short narrative.
Director: Gandja Monteiro. 17 min., World Premiere.

Almost Every Day blurs the lines between documentary and fiction as it depicts a day in the life of a mother-daughter team. On a strange winter day we accompany them on their long journey from home in the faraway neighborhood of Recreio dos Bandeirantes to downtown Rio de Janeiro as young mother Polly struggles against time, traffic, the temptations of big-city life, and her own inadequacies.

For more information please visit the festival’s website: http://www.tribecafilm.com