Brazil's Singing Diva Maria Rita Opens New York's Brazilian Film Festival
Written by Ernest Barteldes
Tuesday, 05 August 2008
One does not need to understand Brazilian culture in order to appreciate this annual festival that once again comes to New York city, beginning with a concert from one of the country's greatest divas, Maria Rita Mariano, who is currently on tour to promote her most recent release, Samba Meu (Warner Latina)
Mariano has become one of the biggest stars in that country's contemporary music scene since the release of her self-titled debut in 2003, when she made her mark by singing pop-flavored songs with a jazzy feel, being backed simply by piano, acoustic bass and drums. On the new disc, she shifted gears a bit by recording a selection of sambas written by various songwriters of different generations.
She told us in an e-mail interview that the choice to make a disc of sambas came "from the fact that I was embraced by the samba crowd." She also explained that she had always "flirted with the genre on my previous discs - it is a real love affair."
Before plunging into a professional career in music, Mariano lived in New York with her father, keyboardist and arranger Cesar Camargo Mariano (her mother, famed singer Elis Regina, passed away in 1981), and she spent various summers attending concerts in Central Park, where she will be performing for the first time.
"I have butterflies in my stomach, specially because of the memories I have of the time I lived in New York," she said. "I remember the excitement that my friends and I had whenever we went to a concert in Central Park, and now I am playing there. I feel like a child - my friends will all be there, it will be crazy... I am not ashamed to say that I am extremely excited about it."
Though she concentrates mostly on material from the new release on the current tour, crowd pleasers like Marcelo Camelo's "Cara Valente" and Milton Nascimento's "Encontros e Despedidas" will surely be on the setlist. Backed by the Branco & Preto Quintet (who have played with her throughout the tour), Rita's samba repertoire will surely turn Rumsey Playfield into a bona-fide samba school.
Also on the menu is Walter Lima Jr's Os Desafinados, a film about a fictional bossa-nova era band that comes to the US to try to make it big in the music business once the movement loses ground in Brazil. The film stars Rodrigo Santoro, who American audiences know through last year's 300.
The Brazilian Film Festival then moves to the Tribeca Cinemas, where they will be screening a competitive selection of films, which go from documentaries, short films and other features, including Ana Jobim's The House of Tom, which is a tribute to her late husband, maestro Antonio Carlos Jobim.
From the Press Release
The opening of the event will tale place on August 10th, at Central Park, with a concert by Maria Rita in homage to the 50 years of Bossa Nova. Followed by the outdoor movie screening of Out of Tune, by Walter Lima Jr.
The tribute continues on August 12th at the United Nations Building with the screening of The House of Tom, during which Ana Jobim, director of the film and widow of the great composer will receive the Crystal Lens.
From August 11th to the 16th the films will be screened during several sessions at the Tribeca Cinemas, as part of the competitive screenings. Every night after the screenings, the audience and guests of the festival, including actors, producers and directors, will be welcomed to the Lounge Petrobras, designed especially for the occasion and with music by DJ Luluta.
The programming also includes the daily exhibition of a short-film from the Revealing the Brasis program. The project, presented in partnership with the Ministry of Culture’s Audiovisual Secretariat and sponsored by Petrobras, was created with the intention to bring worldwide attention to an uncharted Brazil.
The stories are told from the perspective of the average Brazilian, from a small village, and that otherwise would have never had the opportunity to see their talent reach the big screen.
Presented for the first time in the Inffinito Circuit of Festivals, DOC.TV, is a groundbreaking program that fosters the partnership between public TV and independent productions. Implemented in 2003 the program’s objective are to promote the regionalization of documentaries’ production, establish a national circuit for broadcasting through Public Television Networks and to propose a business model that encompasses the existence of regional markets for Brazilian documentaries.
Official Selection
5 Pieces of Almost a Story
By Armando Mendz, Cris Azzi, Cristiano Abud, Guilherme Fiúza, Lucas Gontijo and Thales Bahia
The World in two Round Trips
By David Schurmann
The House of Tom - Mundo, Monde, Mondo
By Ana Jobim
Out of Tune
By Walter Lima Jr
Paper Wedding
By André Sturm
What Ever Happened to Dulce Veiga
By Guilherme de Almeida Prado
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One does not need to understand Brazilian culture in order to appreciate this annual festival that once again comes to New York city, beginning with a concert from one of the country's greatest divas, Maria Rita Mariano, who is currently on tour to promote her most recent release, Samba Meu (Warner Latina)
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The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.