RSVP here: https://www.queer-art.org/rsvp-to-vereda-tropical
All films for this program will be streamed live!
Our first guests this season are queer Brazilian filmmakers Gustavo Vinagre and Fábio Leal, whose films are unabashedly bold, sexually-explicit and confront the realities of living under repressive dictatorial regimes. Their new documentary GOD HAS AIDS shines a light on the little known history of Brazil’s response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s via interviews and performances by contemporary HIV+ artists. For this program, Vinagre and Leal have chosen to screen Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s short film VEREDA TROPICAL live, which features a man who develops an erotic obsession with fruits and vegetables. Made during the military dictatorship in the 1970s, the film was quickly banned for its subversive portrait of liberation. Though it features a heterosexual protagonist, Leal and Vinagre both feel it is a queer film which uses humor and sexuality to break down barriers.
To accompany this short, we’ll also be screening Vinagre’s short documentary FILM FOR A BLIND POET, about blind sadomasochistic poet Glauco Mattoso, and Leal’s narrative short THE DAYTIME DOORMAN, about a complicated affair between a gay man and the doorman who works at his building. The program will include a live screening of all three films, followed by a discussion and Q&A with Vinagre and Leal.
Fábio Leal on VEREDA TROPICAL
“VEREDA TROPICAL is a film about deviant sexuality, made in a time where there was a military dictatorship in Brazil. This film was censored for many years until it came out. It has humor. It has a way of dealing and showing sexuality that was very new to Brazil at that time. It made an impact on me by showing that sex and sexuality could be much more open and freeing and funny as well. The humor of it, the explicitness of it, the bizarre being shown as a regular, normal thing, make it a very queer film, although the protagonist is a heteroseuxal man.”
Gustavo Vinagre on VEREDA TROPICAL
“VEREDA TROPICAL has a subtlety to the encounter between the boy and girl characters…the object of desire is displaced. It can be located in other places: carrots, watermelons, and more. To me, that is really sweet and funny and fun and queer in a really good way. Joachim Pedro de Andrade was really interested in talking about strong symbols of Brazilian nationality. He does that in his masterpiece MACUNAIMA, which was a really important modernist book. Here he is also talking about the strong symbols which define our culture. In this case it's tropicalism, and how fruits are a huge symbol of Brazil. Usually this comes with the symbol of the hot woman, but in this case Andrade just dismisses it and talks about the sensuality of the fruits. There is a lot of irony in this and in the way Andrade locates the film in an intellectual middle-class that is really thinking about these symbols and trying to rationalize them. I think it's very interesting because he takes all the possible sex appeal of the "Latin lover" character and he creates this awkward intellectual character that is thinking about that trope. It's kind of ironic because he's frustrating the macho man symbol which is really embedded in our culture.”
Gustavo Vinagre was born in 1985. He studied Literature at São Paulo University and Scriptwriting at EICTV (Cuba). Vinagre has directed several short films and features including NOVA DUBAI (Rotterdam), I REMEMBER THE CROWS (Cinema du reel, Indie Lisboa), The BLUE FLOWER OF NOVALIS (Berlinale 2019), and Divinely Evil (Berlinale 2020).
Fábio Leal is a Brazilian director, writer, actor, and programmer. He has programmed for the festival, Janela Internacional de Cinema do Recife, directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, since 2013. He wrote, directed, and starred in the short films, THE DAYTIME DOORMAN (2016), shown in 26 film festivals around the world and released on DVD/VOD in 10 countries; and RENOVATION (2018), which premiered at the prestigious 51st Brasília Film Festival, where it was awarded Best Screenplay and Best Actor Prizes, and traveled to over 30 international film festivals, including BFI Flare, IndieLisboa, Outfest, Frameline, NewFest, Provincetown Film Festival, and Iris Prize FF. He is currently writing his first fiction feature, VALLEY OF HOMOSEXUALS. Leal is currently co-directing his first documentary feature, GOD HAS AIDS with Gustavo Vinagre, which is in post-production.