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São Paulo International Film Festival invited several international film directors that were present in São Paulo in its last edition, in 2003, to begin the project of a feature film with visions on the city, raising the importance of the foreign glance with focus on the peculiarities of our metropolis, the third largest city in the world. The result is Bem-Vindo a São Paulo / Welcome to São Paulo, which is having its world premiere in the 28th São Paulo International Film Festival in São Paulo (October 22 to November 4, 2004). All the feature is given prestige to by the narration in Caetano Veloso's voice, that also signs one of the segments of the project. São Paulo is the largest city of the Southern Hemisphere, with an incessant dynamics of cultural mixtures, with immigrants of all the world and migrants of all parts of Brazil.
The gathering of these peculiarities are seen through to the following film directors's sensibilities and their present segments in the feature film Welcome to São Paulo, in the presentation order that proceeds:
MARCO ZERO / GROUND ZERO, by Phillip Noyce (AUSTRALIA) - With several testimonials about the peculiarities of São Paulo, the metropolis that hides social, cultural and ethnic differences, all around the ground zero of the city, in the whereabouts of Sé's Cathedral. Phllip Noyce's nervous camera registers a curious tourism, with a group of students in a trip by the historical center of São Paulo and a biblical preacher of the new era, preaching out of the conventional Catholic cathedral and with a sense of drama close to the aesthetics of Glauber Rocha's Terra em Transe.
NATUREZA-MORTA / STILL LIFE, by Renata de Almieda and Leon Cakoff (BRAZIL). The documentation of a photographic exhibition, with several generations of spectators, contemplates on the importance of memory and it points out the fright before the irreversibility of time.
MANHÃ DE DOMINGO / SUNDAY MORNING, by Mika Kaurismäki (FINLAND). Documents on the remote and vague time of the metropolis, known by its agitations, with its slow awakening on a Sunday morning. A sensitive counterpoint about the occupation of spaces usually invisible in the chaotic days of the week.
NOVO MUNDO / NEW WORLD, by Jim McBride (USA). At the same time in which the director's glance travels by neighborhoods of glorious past and deteriorated landscapes of São Paulo, a touching resistance is observed in its color and in its inhabitants' daily life. The chronicle reinforces that "the landscape that resists guards the memories of a homelike past; the culture that resists is that one we don't want to see".
"ENSAIO GERAL / A REHEARSAL FOR ALL", by Hanna Elias (PALESTINE). The generous document of the whole process of a general rehearsal of a traditional Samba school of São Paulo, Vai-Vai, with its several generations involved, in the middle of a street of Bixiga, a traditional neighborhood known by its connection with generations of Italian immigrants.
ALGUMA COISA ACONTECE / SOMETHING PULLS, by Maria de Medeiros (PORTUGAL - FRANCE). The emblematic corner between the avenues Ipiranga and São João, eternalized in the song Sampa, by Caetano Veloso, it is visited with emotion by the camera of Maria de Medeiros as a film director and as a great actress. As actress, we hear in her whispered voice the lyrics of Sampa, that begins with "Something happens in my heart, only when it crosses Ipiranga and São João Avenue...".
A GARÇONETE / THE WAITRESS, by Kiju Yoshida (JAPAN). A visit to the neighborhood of Liberdade, where ponders the largest Japanese colony of the world, reveals the suffering and the resistance faced by three generations of immigrants from Japan, until their integration with the Brazilian culture. The Japanese immigration began in the beginning of the 20th century and it came to substitute the slave labor of the black people in the coffee plantations. These revelations are heard through an interview with Takeko Oyama, a veteran waitress of a restaurant of Japanese culture, led by actress Mariko Okada, Yoshida’s wife and first lady of the Japanese movies.
CONCRETO / CONCRETE, by Caetano Veloso (BRAZIL). A poet, from the top of a building, names and points out the constructions that he sees with the names of trees in the tupi language: jacarandá, caiuá, paraparaí, urucum, ibirapitanga, orabutã, ibirapiranga, ibirapitã (brazil wood)... A fort and contrasting plastic effect impregnates the buildings with colors, shades and touching twilight lights. Originally, the whole territory of the state of São Paulo was covered with Atlantic rain forest. The forests in concrete, baptized again with the solemn names of trees in tupi, they echo as a new concrete poem, as a new Caetano Veloso's song.
AQUÁRIO / AQUARIUM, by Tsai Ming-Liang (TAIWAN). São Paulo has the largest concentration of buildings in the world. Places where the solitude hides itself and it is only seen when there is breathlessness. When it lacks air. That produces a window where less it is waited. We will see salesmen in the city with their goods, in a rainy day: umbrellas, brooms, dusters and... ornamental fish, isolated, in plastic bags hung in a clothes-line. These images end up serving as introduction to a big one 'aquarius' visited by the film director, that puts his camera in front of a decadent building and visits its apartments, revealing its inhabitants' intense drama.
ESPERANÇA / HOPE, by Ash (USA). A night course in the city, with its deserts and agitation. The film director talks, at first, with a night character, a transvestite, speaking about his past, his dreams and his plans to find a charming prince and to lead a better life. Continuing his search for characters filled with hope, he talks to a middle class young woman, in an elegant bar of the city, that dreams to be a 'top model' and to conquer the catwalks of the world.
FARTURA / PLENTIFUL, by Mercedes Moncada (MEXICO) and Franco De Peña (VENEZUELA). No matter how middlemen a meal has before arriving to the plate, the food as a merchandise has the dimension of the metropolis in which it circulates. The two Latin-American film directors left in search of the characters responsible for the color, the set design and the whole charm of the street fairs.
FORMAS / SHAPES, by Andrea Vecchiato (ITALY). One can say that you should not credit to the past of a city what one waits for its present or for its future. That the marks of a city are recorded by the people that have them. This is the city that unmasks the film director's glance to us, looking for the symbols that waives to us with the fiction of much closer and better futures.
SIGNOS / SIGNS, by Max Lemcke (SPAIN). The communication symbols of the city in a vertiginous collage. The ways of expression of a city, the excess of visual information and the seduction intended by each one of them. Among all the signs, modern and traditional, the attentive glance should really select those that are vital in the daily traffic.
MODERNIDADE / MODERNITY, by Amos Gitai (ISRAEL). A new grand hotel of the city approached by the concepts of a futurist architecture. The metropolitan airport compared to supermarkets. The resources of a digital camera seen as modern fetishes. The solitude in the corridors of the grand hotel and its counterpoint seen by the window, that illustrates a self-devouring city, in a constant reconstruction process.
ESPERANDO ABBAS / WAITING FOR ABBAS, by LEON CAKOFF (BRAZIL). The encounter and the dialogue with a character observed in São Paulo by film director Abbas Kiarostami and the subject of a script on abandoned children in the Paulista Avenue, where also ponders the largest wealth of the country. The former street kid, today a street man, nervous and concerned in defending his integrity, sends a simple and touching message for the director of Taste of Cherry.
ODISSÉIA / ODYSSEY, by Daniela Thomas (BRAZIL). The unusual situation of an elevated road that on Sundays is occupied as a leisure area. The road is traveled equally in the days when the urban traffic is sovereign in its domains. Equally a character of her feature film Foreign Land, co-directed with Walter Salles, the road acquires a homeric dimension here, besides offering surprising imageries of great impact.
BEM-VINDO A SÃO PAULO / WELCOME TO SÃO PAULO, by Wolfgang Becker (GERMANY). A vertiginous descent on São Paulo, from the point of view of a satellite, until approaching the buildings and the streets. Then, an arterial trip begins, in search of the city's identities. The search finishes at a vinyl records store and in the detail of a needle that lands on a record. The record plays Sampa, in Caetano Veloso's original recording.
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director
Vários
screenplay
Leon Cakoff
cinematographer
Aloysio Raulino, Andrea Vecchiato, Ash, Franco de Peña, Hanna Elias, Jim McBride, Max Lemcke, Mercedes Moncada, Mika Kaurismäki, Phillip Noyce, Samuel Kobayashi, Tsai Ming Liang, Vanderlei Gussonato, Vitor Amati, Wolfgang Becker
music
André Abujamra
producer
Renata de Almeida, Leon Cakoff
production company
Mostra Filmes / Mostra Internacional de Cinema / São Paulo International Film Festival
Rua Antonio Carlos, 288 - 01309-010, São Paulo - Tel. 11. 3141.2548 - Fax. 11. 3266.7066
www.mostra.org/welcome.htm
info@mostra.org
100 minutes
Color
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