Rogério Duarte (1939–2016) was a Brazilian graphic designer, typographer, musician and poet. He saw himself as a popular avant-garde artist, both the tribune of Brazilian underground in film, music and painting and a folk artist. As a contemporary and companion of Glauber Rocha, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso he helped found the Tropicalism movement in the 1960s, though he later turned heretic because he refused to forgive the movement’s commercial sell-out.

José Walter Lima’s film portrait is an admiring homage to a natural born independent who practiced his art out of a deep, almost cosmic-religious attitude to life and the world. At one point the director elicits this credo from his protagonist: “Art is not a profession. Art is an approach. It is a way for you to approach things.”

Ralph Eue

The ritual of “tango” is handed down from the ancestors to help end starvation and draught. The villagers collect sacrificial gifts. Their reward is wealth, but in all this abundance they forget the duties of the sacrificial cult. Pedro Giongo and Francisco Gusso mesh parts of Franz Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” with graphic reminiscences of Brazilian folklore and the crowded visual world of the Flemish renaissance in a remarkable parable.

André Eckardt

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Nominated for mephisto 97.6 Audience Award

In 1953 the Villas-Bôas brothers, pioneers of indigenism in Brazil, made first contact with the Kayapó and recorded the amicable meeting in grainy black and white. They anticipated the conflicts between the tribe and the nation state and saw themselves as mediators. To their surprise they discovered a young white man among the Indians: João was the child of Brazilian settlers who had been kidnapped and raised by the Kayapó during the long-running struggle. As he retraces his path, a life between two worlds, without a fixed home, begins for him.

To Fabian Remy this story is a model to describe a society divided even today, though he doesn’t find João among the living. In his stead Thini-á accompanies the director on a biographical search for clues and lives through a mirrored identity conflict. He left his tribe to move to the megacity of Rio de Janeiro after he witnessed how indigenous culture was corroded by modern civilisation. But more and more often nostalgia draws him back to his roots. As he swings pendulum-like between the places, the film takes up his movements on the formal level and follows Thini-á on his rides across dusty plains and the Amazonas region – as a continuing documentary journey. Which would have suited João, too, who spent his later life as a ferryman between the riverbanks.

Lars Meyer