Salve Geral (2009), the new film directed by Sergio Rezende (Zuzu Angel, Lamarca), will represent Brazil at the upcoming Academy Awards ceremony in early 2010.
Salve Geral recounts the events knows as Brazil’s “September 11″, when the local organized crime, an organization called PCC, promoted a highly violent strike against police officers and civil society organizations in Sao Paulo, Brazil‘s largest city. The film’s story is told through the eyes of Lucia (played by Andrea Beltrao), a middle-class mother who decides to engage with PCC in order to protect her son’s life after his recent arrest.
The film, which has a price tag of $4.5 million, is set to premiere in Brazil next week, on October 2. And wile Salve Geral remains without a distribution deal in the United States, it has been rumored that Sony Pictures Classics, a label of Sony Pictures which focuses on foreign and independent cinema in the United States, might have the option to acquire the film and release in the US.
The Foreign Film category at the Academy Awards is one of the most important platforms for foreign cinema in the United States. Every country in the world has to submit one picture per year in order to be nominated for the five spots in the category. The voters specialized in this category (the Academy selects separate voters for each category) have to narrow down the 50-plus films who are entered in Foreign race to a more manageable list of nine nominees – and only then, voters decide what the final five nominees will be.
