Vasto Mundo

One night seven years ago, Rafael came home after work and discovered that people he did not know had come looking for him. He immediately fled, without looking back. From that moment on, his life changed, as if that night had never ended. One evening, around an improvised fire near a factory, he decides to confide his journey to a stranger. Rafael’s intimate account meets the collective testimony of an entire nation oppressed by poverty, police repression and institutional corruption.

André, a teenager, lives in an industrial town in Brazil near an old aluminum factory. One day, a factory worker, Cristiano, suffers an accident. Asked to go to Cristiano’s house to pick up clothes and documents, André stumbles on a notebook, and it’s here that Araby begins — or, rather, transforms. As André reads from the journal entries, we are plunged into Cristiano’s life, into stories of his wanderings, adventures, and loves.

Jorge Bodanzky is, to a large extent, a filmmaker who travels. Constant movement is a hallmark of his creative process, encompassing both personal records and various projects that form the foundation of "Meu Barco É Veleiro". It involves observations and experiences across different continents—a sort of improvised coming-of-age story in which human landscapes reveal the shaping of a unique perspective.

Jorge Bodanzky’s cinematic career is deeply shaped by his engagement with journalism and documentary reporting. "Tenta Louvar o Mundo Mutilado" revisits some of his most significant works in this realm, featuring footage that ranges from Latin American dictatorships to African-rooted religious expressions in Brazil.

A compilation of some of the Super-8 materials shot by Jorge Bodanzky during the Brazilian military dictatorship, blending domestic footage, experiments with the cinematographic medium, and the traces, in an amateur format, of some of his thematic and stylistic obsessions.

The journeys of a filmmaker-traveler through Brazilian social and cultural landscapes swept up in the hurricane of authoritarian modernization imposed by the military dictatorship: Indigenous peoples, "cavalhadas", and migrants. Through Jorge Bodanzky’s lens, we witness the many faces of the storm battering the ways of life and practices of traditional populations.