Brazil / France,
2001, 103 min
Shown in 2003
CREDITS
- dir
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Karim Aïnouz
- prod
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Marc Beauchamps, Donald K. Ranvaud, Vincent Maraval
- scr
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Karim Aïnouz
- cam
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Walter Carvalho
- editor
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Isabela la Monteiro de Castro
- mus
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Sacha Amback, Marcos Suzano
- cast
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Lazaro Ramos, Marcelia Cartaxo, Flavio Bauraqui, Felippe Marques, Emiliano Queiroz
- source
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Wellspring Media, Inc, 419 Park Ave. South, 20th Fl., New York, NY 10016. FAX: 212-545-9931. EMAIL: jstrauss@wellspring.com.
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COMMENTS
Karim Aïnouz in person.
OTHER
“I choose to be a queen but that doesn’t make me less of a man,” declares João Francisco dos Santos, the heart of this truly stranger-than-fiction biography of Brazil’s most infamous drag queen, gay outlaw and folk hero, whose passionate life remains as politically relevant today as it was then. Born in 1900—only twenty years after slavery was abolished—and exchanged for a mule by his poverty-stricken mother, dos Santos became the de facto king (and queen) of Rio de Janeiro’s bohemian Lapa district in the 1930s, turning the elements that society held against him—his sexuality, race and class—into weapons of pride and power. Brothel cook, cabaret singer, street fighter, father of seven adopted children, jailed for a third of his life yet named Queen of Carnaval three times (in a costume inspired by DeMille’s film Madame Satan), he was Brazil’s Jean Genet, Josephine Baker and Robin Hood. Director Karim Aïnouz vividly recreates ’30s Rio as a nocturnal carnival of pushers, pimps, whores and lovers, with the sumptuous cinematography of Walter Carvalho maximizing its decadent, shadowy allure. Lazaro Ramos, in a visceral, intense performance, personifies the anger, pride and aggression—not to mention the glamour and eroticism—of this remarkable legend, a man unwilling to bow down, shut up or step aside.
FACTOID #328
Saul Bass, the genius graphic designer behind the introductory sequences to Hitchcock’s Psycho, Vertigo and North by Northwest, designed the posters for the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth installments of the San Francisco International Film Festival.
