Special Guests 2007
Héctor Babenco
Filmmaker Hector Babenco has always felt an affinity for the marginalized: the abandoned, dispossessed, criminals, vagabonds and inmates. Before he began directing films, he spent 7 years traveling around the world and working as an extra on a number of productions. In 1969 he settled in Brazil. He has since directed more than ten award-winning features, making him perhaps the most successful and versatile filmmaker of the post-cinema novo generation. Heavily vested in the power of cinema to represent reality and to open up an ethical dimension from which to examine contemporary ills, Babenco has produced poignant works which speak to the truth of human suffering and perseverance. Without flaunting a political agenda or appealing to the sentimental, he has turned his camera on the problems that devastate Latin American societies –corruption, violence and inequality– and created unforgettable characters who defy a Manichaean understanding of the world; products, very much of a society that allows them no way to live, that denies their existence and shoves them into the grimmest corners of the country.
Regardless of whether he is working within a documentary mode, or in classic narrative cinema, he manages to infuse his images with a testimonial quality. In the film Lucio Flavio (1977), he was the first filmmaker to shed light on the death squads in Brazil. Four years later, he released Pixote, considered one of the best films of the 1980s and the film that earned him international recognition. Shot in a documentary style, the film portrays the brutality and violence that assails the children of Sao Paulo. Next, Babenco produced the widely successful Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), an extraordinary adaptation of the homonymous novel by Manuel Puig, about the intimate and complicated relationship that develops between two inmates in a South American prison. In 2003, he again explored prison life with the epic Carandiru, which recreates the tense conditions in a Sao Paulo penitentiary during the 1990s. With his most recent film, The Past, Babenco brings us the story of a young man who divorces his wife after 12 years of marriage. The protagonist attempts to put his life back together but finds himself constantly harassed by his ex-wife. Featuring the multifaceted Gael Garcia Bernal, the film marks yet another exciting new direction for this talented filmmaker.
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