The Brazilian Director Who's Up for Multiple Oscars

"For Kleber Mendonça Filho, filmmaking is an act of both provocation and preservation. Mendonça was born in 1968, in the early years of a ruthless military dictatorship-a time when cinema, like much else, was harshly constrained. His mother, Joselice Jucá, was a historian who studied Brazil's abolitionist movement, and she taught him that filling gaps in the cultural memory was a way to expose concealed truths. In Mendonça's work, memory functions as a tool of defiance."

"His relationship with film is inextricably linked with his home town, Recife-a port city where attractive beaches and high-rise developments coexist with sprawling favelas and rampant crime. In his youth, Mendonça was fascinated by the city's grand cinema palaces. He carried a Super 8 camera to the tops of marquees and shot dizzying images; he spent hours in projection booths, learning the mechanics of how films reached the screen."

"Over time, Mendonça watched those theatres fall into decline, an experience that he likened to being aboard a ship as it wrecked. But even as Recife lost its allure, he made the city a fixture of his films-a way of vindicating its place in history. His first narrative feature, "Neighboring Sounds," takes place on a street where he lived as a child, a setting that he spent years documenting."

Kleber Mendonça Filho centers filmmaking on recovering suppressed histories and exposing concealed social truths. Born in 1968 during Brazil's military dictatorship, he inherited from his historian mother a belief that filling gaps in cultural memory reveals injustice. He ties film to his native Recife, documenting its contrast of attractive beaches and sprawling favelas and the decline of its grand cinemas. He learned projection mechanics, shot Super 8 images atop marquees, and repeatedly set films in the city to vindicate its place in history. His work blends political critique, art-house aesthetics and genre elements, often using dark comedy; Neighboring Sounds (2012) received wide acclaim.

Read at The New Yorker