What does it take for a country’s film industry to become a source of cultural soft power? Big box office numbers? Awards at international festivals? Government incentives? Soft power, the ability to seduce rather than coerce, shapes the preferences of worldwide audiences and the image of a country, making its cultural products well-known and widely consumed internationally.

In recent years, the Northeast Region of Brazil has become the center of the country’s film production industry and has caught the attention of festivals worldwide, with some of the most important awards being given to Brazilian filmmakers over the last two decades. Is there a Northeast wave ready to make Brazilian cinema a new cultural soft power?

I spoke with some of the most important filmmakers in the region to get some answers.  Director Gabriel Mascaro told me,

At the end of last century, Northeast filmmakers got tired of aligning their work with the expectations of the Brazilian movie industry dominated by a carioca (Rio de Janeiro) look. That stimulated more independent and original productions, which connected with international filmographie’s expectations. Today, some TV and streaming companies have begun to wake up to this potential. Streaming bet on us and are getting good results.

Mascaro won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival for his movie Neon Bull (2015), which also won the Platform Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival. Neon Bull tells the story of Iremar, who works for a rodeo in northeastern Brazil. He lives in the truck that transports the rodeo animals, where he dreams of a future as a tailor in the region’s booming clothing industry.

Far from Rio

Brazilian audiovisual production has been historically concentrated in major southeastern cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Rio is where TV Globo operates, the largest TV company in Latin America and among the world’s five biggest commercial television stations. For the last four decades, TV Globo has been exporting telenovelas to almost one hundred nations, making it one of Brazil’s most successful exporters of cultural soft power. The drama Escrava Isaura (Isaura the Slave) was distributed in 104 countries and watched by around 1 billion viewers in China alone.

However, in Brazilian cinema, the Northeast Region generates the most award-winning films globally. “There has always been a tradition of cinema in the Northeast, since the silent cinema of Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, of the 1920s. It also helps that great writers are from the region, like Gilberto Freyre. It’s not a surprise that Northeast cinema would explode in the world someday. Northeast filmmakers make their films with local colors, local music, local accents and strong cultures that leverage comedies and dramas. The great inheritance of the New Cinema movement is the decision to take risks with an inventive and pulsating cinema,” says Marcelo Gomes.

Gomez won the Cinema Prize of the French National Education System at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005 for his film Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures and the Silver Q-Hugo Award at the Chicago International Film Festival for Paloma (2022).

The 2005 film tells the story of two men who meet in Brazil’s arid northeastern backlands in 1942. One of the men is a German refugee who travels through cities as an aspirin salesman. The more recent 2022 film is the touching story of Paloma, a farmer who wants a traditional church wedding with her boyfriend Zé, but is refused by local priests because she is a transgender woman.

Paloma, directed by Marcelo Gomes. Used with permission.

Big box offices

Half a century ago, the New Cinema movement put Brazilian cinema on the world map for the first time, with movies that emphasized social inequality and intellectualism. Influenced by Italian neorealism and the French New Wave, it helped Brazilian filmmakers win the most important international awards.

Glauber Rocha won the Fipresci Prize at the Cannes Film Festival with Entranced Earth (1967) and Best Director at Cannes for Antonio das Mortes (1969). Nelson Pereira dos Santos won the Ocic Award at the Cannes Film Festival for Dry Lives (1964), based on the book by the Northeastern writer Graciliano Ramos. Lastly, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade won Best Film at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival for Macunaíma, a surreal comedy and social commentary about a lazy hero who leaves the backlands with his brothers.

However, none of these films from the New Cinema movement made waves with substantial audiences in Brazil. They were less popular because they were seen as too intellectual and superficial, unlike telenovelas.

“The explanation for this is exoticism. International festivals have a very reductant view about Brazil, like if we were zoo animals. Exoticism really matters. Stories about communities in the Northeast, indigenous, quilombolas (afro-Brazilian residents of quilombo settlements, first established by escaped slaves in Brazil) end up gaining great resonance. There’s also a certain historical guilt, a certain desire for reparation, for being colonialists for too long. There are also the stereotypes that we are less developed and very virulent. Movies with those aspects get more attention outside,” says Aly Muritiba.

Muritiba won Best Film at the Venice Film Festival for Private Desert (2021), about a suspended police officer who goes to the Northeast to meet a mysterious woman and falls in love with her, but then discovers that she is transgender. 

Rio de Janeiro is still the source of some of Brazil’s most successful box office hits. Central Station (1998), nominated for Best Foreign Film and Best Actress at the Academy Awards, was seen by 1.6 million people. City of God (2002) received four Academy Award nominations and was seen by 3.4 million viewers. Elite Squad (2007) won the Golden Berlin Bear in the Berlin International Film Festival and was seen by 2.4 million viewers. The sequel, Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within, was seen by 11 million in theaters. Recently, Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here (2024) reached 2 million viewers and is in the running for Academy Award nominations. It tells the story of a congressman who was kidnapped and murdered during Brazil’s military dictatorship. All of these films were produced and set in Rio de Janeiro.

However, the numbers show the Northeast is fighting back. The region’s first phenomenon was A Dog’s Will (2000), based on a classic story by the northeastern writer Ariano Suassuna. It was a huge success as a TV show and a film, seen by 2.2 million people in theaters. On TV, productions located in and based on popular stories from the Northeast were distributed by TV Globo internationally.

Today is Maria’s Day (2005), nominated for best miniseries at the International Emmy Awards is one example. Another is Bacurau, directed by Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho, it won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The film, extremely violent and erotic, is about a city where strange things happen after the death of the city’s matriarch. With clear similarities to New Cinema, but with commercial appeal, it was seen by almost eight hundred thousand in theaters. 

Recently, Prime Video’s New Bandits (2023), directed by Aly Muritiba and Fabio Mendonça, became an international hit. It was a Top 10 show in 49 countries, including 24 African countries, 9 Asian countries, Canada, Portugal and Brazil. It is one of the more recent shows produced in Brazil at this level of sophistication.

The show is a modern version of The Bandit (1953), about a man who terrorizes poor villages in the Northeast of Brazil. It was renewed for a second season and won the International Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

A new cultural soft power?

Is the wave of Northeastern cinema a new Brazilian soft power? “Yes!” says Halder Gomes, a comedy director based in the region. “Northeast movies are desired and hoped for by international festival curators. They already know that the region is a hotbed of potent films. Northeast cinema is already a ‘commodity,’ in a good way, in international festivals.” Half a million viewers have seen the local Cine Holliúdy in theaters and O Shaolin do Sertão (2016) has been seen by over six hundred thousand in theaters.

Both productions generated sequels, spin-offs and TV versions for TV Globo and Netflix. “But I think there must have been a political will among the states of the region and the federal government to make the Northeast cinema a soft power. A will to expand, distribute, the same strategy the American government did with Hollywood in the 1940s and South Korea is doing today,” Aly Muritiba reminds us.

That may be true. But not even political will can turn a cultural product into soft power without genuine artistic talent behind it. Today, the Northeast of Brazil is a hub for great filmmaking.

Besides the filmmakers above, the region also gave the world Sergio Machado, winner of the Award of the Youth at the Cannes Film Festival with Lower City (2005); Claudio Assis, winner of the CICAE Award at the Berlin International Film Festival with Mango Yellow (2005); and Monique Gardenberg, whose TV version of her movie Ó pai, Ó was nominated for an international Emmy in 2009.

The region’s Karim Ainouz, nominated for Berlin’s Golden Berlin with his Futuro Beach (2014) and Cannes’ Palme d’Or and Queer Palm for Motel Destino (2024), tells stories set in the northeast state of Ceará in both films.

Brazil’s cultural products have exerted soft power in the past. Bossa Nova seduced the ears and hearts of the world beginning in the 1950s. In the 2000s, funk and trap became the new move. Brazil’s Carnival festival is still one of the most celebrated events in the world, attracting millions of tourists from across the globe.

However, all these cultural phenomena have been centered around Rio de Janeiro. Maybe now is the time for the stories and artists of the Northeast to shine brighter and become a new center for Brazil’s cultural soft power.

[Joey T. McFadden edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.