Gustavo Vinagre and Fábio Leal present VEREDA TROPICAL, FILM FOR A BLIND POET, and THE DAYTIME DOORMAN
(Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1978; Gustavo Vinagre, 2012; Fábio Leal, 2016)
For this program, Brazilian filmmakers Gustavo Vinagre and Fábio Leal screened Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s short film VEREDA TROPICAL live, which features a man who develops an erotic obsession with fruits and vegetables. Made during the military dictatorship in the 1970s, the film was quickly banned for its subversive portrait of liberation. Though it features a heterosexual protagonist, Leal and Vinagre both feel it is a queer film which uses humor and sexuality to break down barriers.
To accompany this short, we screened Vinagre’s short documentary FILM FOR A BLIND POET, about blind sadomasochistic poet Glauco Mattoso, and Leal’s narrative short THE DAYTIME DOORMAN, about a complicated affair between a gay man and the doorman who works at his building. The program included a live screening of all three films, followed by a discussion and Q&A with Vinagre and Leal.
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Fábio Leal on VEREDA TROPICAL:
“VEREDA TROPICAL is a film about deviant sexuality, made in a time where there was a military dictatorship in Brazil. This film was censored for many years until it came out. It has humor. It has a way of dealing and showing sexuality that was very new to Brazil at that time. It made an impact on me by showing that sex and sexuality could be much more open and freeing and funny as well. The humor of it, the explicitness of it, the bizarre being shown as a regular, normal thing, make it a very queer film, although the protagonist is a heteroseuxal man.”
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Gustavo Vinagre on VEREDA TROPICAL:
“VEREDA TROPICAL has a subtlety to the encounter between the boy and girl characters…the object of desire is displaced. It can be located in other places: carrots, watermelons, and more. To me, that is really sweet and funny and fun and queer in a really good way. Joachim Pedro de Andrade was really interested in talking about strong symbols of Brazilian nationality. He does that in his masterpiece MACUNAIMA, which was a really important modernist book. Here he is also talking about the strong symbols which define our culture. In this case it’s tropicalism, and how fruits are a huge symbol of Brazil. Usually this comes with the symbol of the hot woman, but in this case Andrade just dismisses it and talks about the sensuality of the fruits. There is a lot of irony in this and in the way Andrade locates the film in an intellectual middle-class that is really thinking about these symbols and trying to rationalize them. I think it’s very interesting because he takes all the possible sex appeal of the “Latin lover” character and he creates this awkward intellectual character that is thinking about that trope. It’s kind of ironic because he’s frustrating the macho man symbol which is really embedded in our culture.”
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About Queer|Art|Film Club: Free Your Mind
Organized by curators Adam Baran and Heather Lynn Johnson, the third “stay-at-home” digital season of the long-running screening series— titled Queer|Art|Film Club: Free Your Mind— focuses on the art of cinema as it arrives at a challenging crossroads. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, funding, production, and distribution opportunities for filmmakers changed dramatically in a variety of ways. As we enter year two, we’ll be talking with five filmmakers at different phases in their careers about the unique challenges they’ve faced in the pursuit of their art, and how they envision the future of film. What does it mean to be a queer filmmaker during the COVID-19 pandemic? How can LGBTQ+ movie makers continue to get their stories and voices heard in a content-cluttered media landscape? And can the cinema of the past offer clues and guidance for how to move forward into uncharted territory? Join us for another thought-provoking season of groundbreaking films and conversation.
Queer|Art|Film is presented with support by HBO
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