TSPDT

Key Production Country: Brazil
Key Genres: Drama, Political Drama, Political Satire, Documentary, Crime Drama, Adventure Drama
Key Collaborators: Eduardo Escorel (Editor), Mauricio do Valle (Leading Character Actor), Antonio Pitanga (Leading Actor), Hugo Carvana (Leading Character Actor), Rosa Maria Penna (Leading Character Actress), Geraldo Del Rey (Leading Actor), Claude-Antoine (Producer), Othon Bastos (Leading Character Actor), Sergio Ricardo (Composer), Jofre Soares (Character Actor), Danuza Leao (Character Actress), Joel Barcellos (Character Actor)

"Rocha's concern with thematic dialectics is most apparent in his explorations of Brazilian popular culture, which he perceived as representing both a permanent rebellion against oppression and the evasion of social problems... Rocha's efforts to form a genuinely Brazilian cinema, founded on authentic themes and expressed through an idiom peculiar to Latin America, led him to make beautiful and moving films which continue to speak for his ideals." - John Mraz (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 1991)

"The radical films of Glauber Rocha draw on the cultural traditions of Brazil. Often contrasting primitive and modern facets of his country, Rocha uses ritualized theatrical techniques and political texts. Rocha was the leader of the group Cinema Novo, a cooperative set up in the late 1950s, whose aim was to free Brazilian films of American influence." - Ronald Bergan (Film - Eyewitness Companions, 2006)

"He studied law before becoming a theatre director and film critic, the helped to create the Brazilian cinema novo, a movement concerned with the underdeveloped status of the country and the search for Brazilian identity. He made his debut as a director with the short Pátio (1959), and was known for his radical, provocative approach to directing and his preference for using non-actors in his films." - Chambers Film Factfinder, 2006

"Widely heard-of though seldom seen, Rocha’s films are among the hardest to place in the canon of new cinemas from the 1960s. A tricontinental artist – he made films not just in Brazil but in Europe and Africa – Rocha was the victim of his own transience; he revelled in contradictions, in his aggressive theorising and self-attributed “aesthetic of hunger” – which took him from third-world-isation to the forefront of international filmmaking. From Terra em transe (1967) on, Rocha’s films resemble the didacticism of Godard’s Dziga-Vertov period, but damn if they were ever as detached from their causes as those films, so stilted in their narration, so caught in their time that – as the years have proved – they’ve barely moved forward at all. When Rocha made films, they were to reach Brazil in depths that no one had yet dreamt of." - Gabe Klinger (Senses of Cinema, 2005)

"Perhaps the premier Brazilian filmmaker, Rocha is an artist with a social conscience who makes films reflecting the barbarity, beauty, earthiness, and inequality in the culture of his country. Sometimes he illustrates truths through myths." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)

"In 1962 he completed his first feature film as director, Barravento, followed by superb films like Black God, White Devil and Antonio das Mortes which made him a prominent contributor to the revitalised Brazilian cinema - Cinema Novo. These films reflected Rocha's interest in his country, its roots, traditions, conflicts, violence, mysticism and primitivism, but their powerful, lyrical imagery, backed with rich musical soundtracks and contained within essentially allegorical frameworks, were also strident calls to revolution in the face of oppression and exploitation." - The Illustrated Who's Who of the Cinema, 1983