If you missed Brazilian filmmaker Beto Brant
last night at Vanderbilt's Sarratt Cinema, you still have two more chances to see his films with Brant discussing them in person. This afternoon's feature is 1998's Friendly Fire, a crime thriller about four friends who survived brutal torture at the hands of the military dictatorship that governed Brazil in the early 1970s. When they cross paths with one of their torturers 25 years later, they decide to exact revenge.
"I think we can say that Beto navigates in different genres like thriller, action, adventure, drama relating them with many influences such Brazilian literature and movies, and other influences like American, and European movies," says Sonia Dias, a Fulbright fellow and visiting scholar at Vanderbilt, who helped with Brant's visit to Nashville. (Her husband, Willem Dias, is a noted Brazilian film editor who cut the director's most recent film.)
"In his movies he presents a myriad of human feelings in their complexity like passion, lust, revenge, friendship, with the many grays that the feelings used to have," Dias explains. "Beto is well known for his relationship with the actors and actress and the way he brings the best from them in his movies. But for me, above all, he is a generous and a passionate person who brings us not only good movies, stories and characters but many insightful thoughts about people, life, feelings and cinema."
Brant hosts a round-table lunch discussion on "Making Movies in Brazil" at noon today in Vanderbilt's Buttrick Hall 103. The movie follows at 4 p.m. in the same room. The series concludes 4 p.m. tomorrow in Buttrick 103 with a screening of Brant's 2002 Sundance prize-winner The Trespasser, with the director attending. All events are free and open to the public.
