Features

Nove Crônicas para um Coração aos Berros, with Simone Spoladore and Júlio Andrade

After one decade producing shorts, seeking to explore ways that would escape the conventional, 400 FILMES entered a new phase in 2011 – the year of the postproduction of the company’s first two feature films. The exploration of new pathways continues to be one of our goals; what has changed is the format.

On the one hand, we have Nine Chronicles for a Screaming Heart (Nove Crônicas para um Coração aos Berros), a fiction feature that mixes characters and genres, and draws references from Roy Andersson, Robert Polidori, Raymond Carver and Absurd Theater. The result is a film that seeks to provoke the viewer’s estrangement and then invites him to experience film as an expression of multiple possibilities. The project is based on different characters from an unidentified city at the moment of their personal reinvention.

The production was made possible with own funds and thanks to different types of backing and partnerships, including with the post-production sound studio Effects Filmes and the São Paulo-based production company Ludofilmes. The model adopted was straightforward, autonomous and open to improvisation, to allow actors and technicians to feel free to take risks. It was the willingness to take risks that motivated Gustavo Galvão and his team to embark on that adventure: nine stories shot in 19 days, with 24 actors on 30 locations.

Lasting 93 minutes, Nine Chronicles for a Screaming Heart will begin its career in the festival circuit in 2012.

A Cidade é uma Só?, documentary directed by Adirley Queirós

Since the second semester of 2011, Is the City One Only? (A Cidade é uma Só?) is on the schedule of TV Brasil’s program. The documentary was awarded at the competition Brasília 50 years, a celebration of Brasília’s 50th birthday, promoted by the Ministry of Culture and the Empresa Brasil de Comunicação. The film implodes all the expectations that the theme and the genre might engender. The documentary is 52 minutes long. A 73-minute version for theatrical exhibition was released in October 2011, at the Semana dos Realizadores (film festival in Rio de Janeiro).

Directed by Adirley Queirós, a creative filmmaker working in the satellite town of Ceilândia, the documentary mixes techniques and combines every possible method of documentary narrative. It includes interviews, pseudo-documentary scenes, historical reconstruction and the insertion of archive images and sounds.

All those resources are used to tell the other side of Brasília’s history, the B-side of the “capital of hope”. Adirley reflects on the emergence of Ceilândia, an emblematic fact, since it was the result of a campaign of expulsion of workers, migrants and other “undesirable” citizens from the Pilot Plan, undertaken by the Government of Brasília in 1971. Today, truth be told, the city is not just one city.

To find out more about the feature films by 400, go to the pages A CIDADE É UMA SÓ? and NOVE CRÔNICAS PARA UM CORAÇÃO AOS BERROS. To read news about both films, got to the page NEWS.