New Media Guys from Brazil
The special focus on televison in Brazil shows some odd-humouresque-edgy characters and some profound, insights into Brazilian televison programmes. It is presented by Marcelo Tas, who is the inventive creator of the fictitious TV reporter Ernesto Varela, played by Marcelo Tas himself. ‘Varela in Serra Pelada' is one of the adventurous video episodes where Varela ‘reports' from locations around Brazil that are off the beaten track. His reports from the Serra Pelada gold fields, where 40,000 Brazilians work with ant-like dedication, for example, reveals Tas' love for black humour he uses when questioning Brazilian ideals. In ‘Netos do Amaral‘ Varela explores a Brazil close to the frontier to French-Guiana where he ends up in a nonsense conversation with natives.
A similar character is ‘Professor Planeta', whose author-director-actori s Marcelo Tas. Pro­ fessor Planeta is a series of funny short films in the world of sports. Planeta lives inside the lenses of a microscope where he manipulates electronic images and live objects in a round area on the screen, while he creates a variety of absurd scientific theories trying to reveal the human nature of sports.
A rather different look at the meaning of sports is demonstrated in the documentary ‘Before' by the award-winning TV documentary filmmaker Joao Moreira Salles. 'Before' is a part of a sensitive study on the soccer culture in Brazil, which tells the story of a boy hoping to become a professional player. The documentary series is trying to find the rea­son that made Brazil the world home to soccer. His documentary ‘News from a personal war' is a touching and intense study focusing on urban violence in Rio de Janeiro, where the police, drugdealers and average dwellers are involved in a daily war that does not know winners. Moreira Salles has been awarded several prizes for his profound documentaries on ethnographic subjects, profiles of artists and screenplays as well as for his
feature ‘Blues' (1990).