The 9^th Rome Film Festival (October 16-25, 2014) will assign the Marc’Aurelio Award for Lifetime Achievement to Walter Salles, award-winning Brazilian director, screenwriter, and producer; Berlinale Golden Bear and Golden Globe-winner for Central do Brasil (1998). Director of one of the most beloved films in recent years, The Motorcycle Diaries, awarded in Cannes and Oscar®-winner for Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures. On the occasion of the award ceremony, Walter Salles will present the world premiere screening of his new film Jia Zhangke, un gars de Fenyang. Salles considers Jia Zhangke “the most important contemporary filmmaker”. Marie-Pierre Duhamel and Marco Müller will moderate the on stage conversation with Walter Salles and Jia Zhangke.

“Jia Zhangke reminds us that film is still a place that can help us improve our understanding of the world that surrounds us”, Walter Salles stated. “He has become the most important film director of his generation for an increasing number of cinephiles. By way of his films, cinema can still be the quintessential ground for discovery and revelation. According to Jia Zhangke, film is a means of recording mutating memory while keeping track of something that won’t be there any longer. His films portray ordinary people that he defines as ‘power non-holders’. In the last scene of Sanxia Haoren (Still Life), a man is walking on a tightrope between two buildings scheduled to be demolished. Man in an unstable balance, obliged to relate to something bigger than himself, may well be the character in common among Jia Zhangke’s films. In moments like this, you become aware that his films are made of stuff transcending specific physical or human geography. His characters come from the Shanxi region. But the existential problems of his filmsdon’t have borders. They involve all of us.”

Marco Müller, Director of the Rome Film Festival, commented on the assignment of the Marc’Aurelio Award for Lifetime Achievement  to Walter Salles as follows: “The most complete and complex personality in glocal cinema is undoubtedly the Brazilian film director Walter Salles. In order to (re)uncover an identity and explore the deepest restlessness of a huge, contradictory country, Salles has experimented with several ways to re-sensitivize the gaze: so that coming from the roots it could encompass the world outside. Film after film, he has been able to invent ever new allegorical flexible-geography parables built on movement, circulation – in Brazil (A grande arte, Central do Brasil, Abril despedaçado) and the whole Latin American continent (Diarios de motocicleta); in Europe (Terra estrangeira) and the US (On the Road). To show a portion of the planet, according to Salles, is a moral act. This is why his idea of transnational (never globalized) cinema is the only one that has been able to bypass nostalgia and fetishism, reuniting the ‘father’ (cinema novo) with both the ‘lost nation’ and the world.

Salles was not content with defining a new language and the mode of production that would correspond to it. Therefore, the multiple cultural references and industrial experimentation of A grande arte (an upmarket debut film) were followed by Terra estrangeira and O primeiro dia, two important small ‘resistance films’ co-directed with set designer Daniela Thomas. These two works, driven by libertarian, non-reconciled forces (irreconcilable with the then dominating neon-realism), did transcribe the transformations under way in the Brazilian political space – they belong respectively to the retomada period (the ‘recovery’of Brazilian cinema in the post-Collor years) and the one that immediately followed. These two films, by breaking the conventions of neo-noir (a genre they supposedly belong to), and by leaving behind the usual patterns of conflict and resolution, show a world where violence is always lurking and only class solidarity can guarantee fragile protection.

Even when the point of departure is some particularly evident natural material (in his films, locations often take on the role of real characters), Salles frequently lets himself be conquered by human material (in Diarios, the passage from the majestic Andean landscape to the Indio couple, as well as from the Amazon Rio to the leper colony, leads to the discovery of another side of a universe of stories). Form and technique are at the service of story: the formal project, however, bends to follow narrative strategies but also the encounters, the unforeseen possibilities that come up during shooting, so that emotion always prevails over discourse. Even when he deals with favelas and sertão, those places that by convention expose the other side of Brazil’s positivist modernity, he reveals their material and dusty quality, only to focus on the pain/love lines.

The visual universe of Salles’ cinema responds to divergent impulses. On the one hand, it punges into realism and testimonial cinema – “a revision of neorealism through cinema novo”, according to the film director: in fact, a continuous reinvention-redefinition, as is proved by Linha de passe, the third film co-directed with Daniela Thomas. On the other hand, it quests after abstraction, experimentation through conceptual images – bars, fences, and borders as in Abril despedaçado (a tribute to Limite, directed by Mario Pexoto in 1930, and “one of the most Brazilian and most extraordinary films” according to Salles, who has contributed to save and restore it); or, from Terra estrangeira onwards, the images representing the discovery of the mar, the arrival on the ocean’s shore, are a metaphor of the victory of the individual over society (an ephemeral victory, now that Glauber Rocha’s revolutionary utopia seems impossible).

Walter Salles considers himself a documentarian who makes feature films. He has also stated: “to think cinema is just as important as to make it”. Each new film is made more alive by the provisional results of this continuous thinking. It is not difficult to see a logical and poetic advancement from one work to the next; and, in parallel with it, the unceasing frequentation of a great variety of textual referents and artistic languages (Salles is very well aware of the materials he chooses and of their composition, as well as of the imaginaire he must tackle and manipulate). One should not be surprised, then, that this cineaste, proven to have learned the lessons of new realisms (he is as well at ease in the universe of Rossellini as in Wenders’),

has also devoted more and more attention to the methods and practice of two contemporaries, Abbas Kiarostami and Jia Zhangke. This is the philosophy that the Brazilian film director has articulated in his latest film, Jia Zhangke, un gars de Fenyang, the first feature that powerfully marks his return to documentary film. 

CLICK HERE TO READ WALTER SALLES BIOGRAPHY AND FILM SYNOPSIS