"Nos do Cinema" (We of the Cinema) is a documentary that follows six film students in Rio de Janeiro as they struggle to overcome obstacles in film school and pursue their love of cinema.
The film - directed by Finn Yarbrough '09 and produced by Chaney Harrison '11 - opened CineBRASIL, the second annual Brazilian Film Festival at Brown, this weekend.
The festival featured seven feature-length films - including "Nos do Cinema" - and four shorts, as well as a presentation on Yarbrough and Harrison's research project in Brazil on opening night. Two of the film students from Brazil featured in the documentary, Thiago da Cruz Marques and Tomas Meirreles, visited Brown for the festival and spoke about their film school
experiences.
The project started with a proposal by Yarbrough and Harrison to travel to Rio de Janeiro and research film and media in Brazil by working with an institution called Cinema Nosso. With the help of an Oliver Kwon Grant, offered through the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the two Brown students were able to travel to Brazil in the summer of 2008 to teach a one-week film workshop and film their documentary.
Harrison said the documentary was intended to promote Cinema Nosso, an organization that is both a school and a nonprofit, teaching the art of film to low-income youth in Rio as a means of empowerment and cultural expression, according to the organization's Web site. Harrison and Yarbrough wanted the film to be a positive piece that would provide background information on the school and capture the organization's positive impact on the students and on the community.
But while working with Cinema Nosso, the two filmmakers began to notice that the organization was not following through with its advertised objectives, Harrison said. In the two and a half months that Harrison stayed in Brazil, only two classes were taught at the school, each of them lasting only one week.
He said he also noticed that the administration hardly interacted with students, even though during their interviews in the documentary, faculty claim to collaborate with them on various film projects.
In talking to the students at the school, with whom they had developed strong relationships, Harrison and Yarbrough began to understand that Cinema Nosso was not as wholly dedicated to its students as it advertised.
A group of students, including Meirreles and Marques, had prepared an extensive proposal for a film they wanted to make and requested to use one of the Cinema Nosso cameras for their project. The administrators told the students they could only rent out a camera one day a month and would need to provide a one-month notice of their request.
"There are three full cameras at Cinema Nosso," Harrison said, "but only Luis (Nascimento, President of Cinema Nosso) uses them to make his own film."
Further discussions with the students at the school helped Harrison and Yarbrough delve deeper into Cinema Nosso's backstory throughout their documentary.
The institution began as a film school called Nos do Cinema. Founded by the filmmakers who created "City of God," the school offered students a one-year program in which they would be able to study the history and theory of film, as well as the basics of film production. Nos do Cinema was a nonprofit and depended on donations to stay in business and to purchase film equipment.
According to Marques, a dispute among the founders of Nos do Cinema resulted in the break-up of the original administrative team and the name change to Cinema Nosso.
As Meirreles claims in the film, as a result of the discord between the artists and the bureaucrats, "the artists left, and the bureaucrats dominated" in the end.
Now, rather than being a one-year program, Cinema Nosso offers various short workshops throughout the year. These can last anywhere from one day to one week. Ideally they should run consistently throughout the year, but in actuality are scheduled few and far between.
Since Harrison and Yarbrough's class about film basics last summer, there have only been two subsequent classes taught at Cinema Nosso, each only a week long.
According to Marques, when Harrison and Yarbrough contacted the organization about teaching their one-week course, Cinema Nosso did not have students for them and had to call former students and ask them to participate in the class.
"They called me at home," Marques said. "They needed students, so they invited me to take the class."
Despite slow business at Cinema Nosso, the organization still employs seven administrators and continues to receive donations as a nonprofit, Harrison said.
The documentary includes interviews with the Cinema Nosso students about obstacles they have faced with the administration, as well as interviews with the administrators themselves.
Harrison said his favorite part of working on the project was meeting and interacting with the students at the film school.
"The most validating part has been bringing them here (to Brown) to tell their own story," Harrison said.
He and Yarbrough do not consider their film to be a "final cut" and intend to re-edit it to include new information they have learned about Cinema Nosso.
"With this film," Marques said, "the truth came out."
There will be an additional screening of "Nos do Cinema" on Tuesday at 8 p.m. in MacMillan 117. The two Brazilian film students will be available for a question-and-answer session after the screening.
