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A poster advertising the 2009 It’s All True Documentary Festival, held March 25 – April 5 in São Paulo, Brazil, claims that popcorn “goes good” with documentaries too. Anyone who has laid out $20+ at the multiplex and munched through a buttered bucket during The Dark Knight would view this enticement with the same scepticism as any denizen of the dusty, last aisle at the video store. A king-sized bag of M&Ms with your copy of Darwin’s Nightmare? I don’t think so. This is no less true for those queuing up at It’s All True’s free screenings of international and Brazilian documentaries. A baby is abandoned by his drunken father, who is discovered to have repeatedly sodomized his infant son in Kim Longinotto’s Rough Aunties (2008). Images of Buddhist monks beaten by battalions of police are captured on cell-phone cameras aimed steps away from the violence in Anders Østergaard’s Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country (2008). Native populations are massacred in a land grab by unscrupulous Amazon fazendeiros in Vincent Carelli’s Corumbiara (2009). A mother of eleven mixes water and sugar as a regular meal for her children in José Padilha’s Garapa (2009). Popcorn? The only popcorn I consumed was to quell stomach pangs between back-to-back screenings.
 An excavation of an ugly footnote in Brazil’s recent history, Chaim Litwak’s Cidadão Boilesen (2009), winner of the festival’s Brazilian competition, is another entry in the growing catalogue of left-leaning films about the Brazilian military dictatorship. Documentaries such as Hércules 56 (Silvio Da-Rin, 2006) and Condor (Roberto Mader, 2007) scrutinise the era, while films ostensibly on other subjects, including João: The Brain Behind the Game (André Iki Siqueira and Beto Macedo, 2007), about a beloved soccer coach, and recent documentaries about singers Caetano Veloso and Simonal, inevitably address the dictatorship’s consequences, which permeate political, economic, and cultural life in Brazil to this day. These films give a public airing to the crimes and grievances that the 1979 Amnesty Laws swept under the rug and perhaps explain why the era remains magnetic subject matter for documentary makers and art-house audiences.
Henning Albert Boilesen was a Dutch national who settled in Brazil and became the CEO of Ultra Group and an enthusiastic supporter of the generals who reigned from 1964 to 1985. He not only raised significant funds for Operation Bandeirante (OBAN), which hunted, tortured, and killed left-wing militants, but he also frequently dropped by OBAN headquarters for random torture sessions, occasionally taking part. Expertly handling a barrage of information, director Litwak juxtaposes contradictory testimonials to revelatory effect, using an upbeat musical score and a rapid editing style to provide a cathartic experience for survivors of the repressive regime—and an infuriating one for the regime’s supporters.
Put on a hit list by left-wing militants, Boilesen was eventually gunned down in 1971. When the former archbishop of São Paulo says in the film that he had refused to give Boilesen a Catholic service nor would he mention his name in church, the audience gave out a collective whoop. When Boilesen’s son asserts that his father’s murder is just one more un-prosecuted crime, a 20-something sitting in front of me exhaled a controversial, “I agree.” Director Litwak told me in an e-mail interview that he hoped his film would generate “new inquiries into this period. […] Above all […] the release of official documents, [which] is fundamentally important for any type of serious debate to take place.”
Among the many preoccupations of activist filmmakers is the ability of their works to have a positive impact or even to instigate change. At It’s All True’s parallel documentary conference, director Avi Mograbi fielded a question about his films, 100 percent dedicated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Listing a host of Israeli writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals who have tried and failed to influence the government to make peace with Palestine, the questioner asked Mograbi what should be done. “I was going to ask you,” he responded. “I came here hoping you would know.”
In his 2008 musical-slash-documentary Z32, which screened as part of a tribute to the Israeli director, Mograbi sings a song about his willingness to protect an Israeli soldier involved in a war crime. When asked by another audience member if he had received any threats, dealing as he does with such explosive political material, Mograbi responded, “I wish I would get one angry letter.” Beyond the glibness, his implication was that no one is paying attention, even if they see his films. He mentioned Ari Folman’s acclaimed Waltz with Bashir (2008), explaining that coverage of the film in Israel addressed only “safe” topics like the innovative animation and the well-being of Israeli soldiers. The efficacy or morality of the government’s policy toward its neighbours was never mentioned. “Israel is not ready, I guess,” he said.
 Vincent Carelli’s Corumbiara, another of six domestic competition films, tackles the issue of Brazil’s own population of displaced peoples. Through his production team at Video Nas Aldeias, Carelli has been shedding light on indigenous issues for more than 20 years, giving tribes the tools to share their own stories. In the mid-’80s, he captured footage of a native tribe that had never before encountered white people. The video of astonished Indians aired at the time as a segment on a popular newsmagazine program, Fantástico. In Corumbiara, Carelli returns to this material, exploring it in-depth.
Alongside a representative of FUNAI (Fundação Nacional do Índio), Carelli enlists members of the Canoê people to gather evidence of a massacre that took place in 1987 and to document the existence of another threatened tribe. The true subject of the film becomes the steady attrition of native populations and how all efforts to prevent it, including the filmmakers’ at documenting them, contribute to their demise. In one remarkable sequence, Carelli lets the camera run while Tiramantu speaks at length in her own language. He wisely refrains from imposing explanatory voiceover, subtitles, or a musical soundtrack as we watch the last of this tribe transform before our eyes.
The 35mm Garapa, another Brazilian competition entry, comes from José Padilha, whose 2007 fiction feature Tropa de Elite, about the licensed-to-kill police force that terrorizes Rio de Janeiro’s shantytowns, scandalised critics when it won the Golden Bear at 2008’s Berlin Film Festival. Not one to shy away from difficult or complex subject matter, Padilha has explored the socio-economic roots of violent crime in 2002’s Bus 174 (directed with Felipe Lacerda) and the human costs of deforestation in 1999’s The Charcoal People (Nigel Noble), which Padilha both scripted and produced. In Garapa, he has left behind the cinematic flashiness of Tropa de Elite and made a quiet tragedy in austere black and white, following three families as they face life in poverty.
Hard-as-pebble beans are served up as the one meal of the day in Brazil’s burning north-eastern sertão. The mother of three from a slum on the outskirts of the city refuses to leave her alcoholic husband who we begin to suspect abuses one of the girls. Another mother is ineligible for state aid as she cannot supply the proper documents. Meanwhile the adults use cigarettes and cachaça to suppress their own hunger. The movie bristles with the unspoken question of birth control until, two-thirds in, Padilha finally asks.
 After the screening, Padilha told the festival audience he had intended to make a purely direct-cinema documentary. While shooting, however, he could not help but violate the form’s protocols by addressing his subjects from behind the camera. Padilha also stepped in behind the scenes, taking one child on a desperately needed visit to the dentist and sending money periodically to the families. And for the millions of others in Brazil going hungry? Padilha urged support of a pending constitutional amendment that would leave the government vulnerable to lawsuits for ignoring its starving. How can audiences know this when he’s not around for post-screening discussions? “In my experience, the people who are going to help don’t require a message at the end of the movie,” Padilha told me in a later interview. “They are going to get on the Internet and find out on their own.”
Billing docs as entertainment may be one way to get “eyeballs,” but high ticket sales among the popcorn-munching crowd is not necessarily the goal of documentary makers looking to provoke change. Sure, few would turn down the audiences that Michael Moore has grown over the years. Even more would settle for earning a decent living. Most are simply pleased to reach their targeted audience—no small feat. Yet my guess is every last one would prefer seeing their films make a difference than attract record numbers, not remotely the same thing.
At another conference panel, veteran Brazilian filmmaker Orlando Senna shared his memories seeing Santiago Álvarez’s Now! (1968). A montage of still images from the struggle for Civil Rights in the U.S., the seven-minute film is edited to the recording of Lena Horne’s eponymous song, which the singer gave to Álvarez after it was banned from U.S. airwaves. Senna described watching the film in the late ’70s in Salvador, Bahia, with someone “looking through a little window to see if the police were coming.” Álvarez, the Cuban revolution’s leading director, always avoided the documentary label, preferring to call himself a “news pamphleteer,” implying that his films could not only be put together quickly and cheaply but could also be distributed with the ease of a pamphlet handed out on the street.
With the digital age upon us, many have hoped that the Internet might become the equivalent of the street corner, where Senna imagined an interactive media landscape replacing the old paradigm of “one film for millions to watch” with “millions choose your film to watch.” But whatever the technology, to be effective that pamphlet still must be read, and the mind that reads it moved to act. When we’re gliding through this new and improved cybersphere and a message powerful enough to awaken our innermost activist flits across our screen, let’s hope our fingers aren’t so greasy from eating all that popcorn that they slip off the mouse before we can click through and do some good.
Shari Kizirian has written extensively on independent, silent-era, and world cinema. She currently lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The original version of this article was published in the online journal Senses of Cinema.
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