Brazil – Brazil Choir / Brazil String Orchestra / Quatuor Ébène / Richard Héry
The last day of our second trip to Brazil, August 2016, was spent traveling from Manaus, in the Amazon, to Campinas, just north of São Paulo, to catch our flight back to the United States. We had a four hour stopover in Brasília, the planned city capital of Brazil. Enough time to catch a bus and take some pictures of the nerve center of the city , the mall with all the government buildings, just as the sun was setting.
Brasília was founded in 1960, developed much like Washington D.C. in the States as a city designed to be the federal capital of Brazil, within a federal district distinct as a municipality from the rest of the country. The city structure is known as the Pilot Plan, in the shape of an airplane or bird with a wide wingspan. The centers of all three branches of government (Congress, President and Supreme Court) are located in the head, or cockpit, of Brasília’s bird, or plane. And that is where these twilight pictures were taken.
National Museum
Ministerial buildings line up like domino pieces.
Statues and vendors in front of the National Cathedral
Inside the Cathedral
After exploring the gate for a bit, we wondered whether that glimpse from outside was all we could expect anymore. We were about to leave. But then I said, “Let’s just ring the doorbell. Maybe someone can at least tell us what’s up.” We rang, and then rang again, and then rang again. I suppose that was a bit obnoxious of us, but our curiosity and interest were for once stronger than our reticence.
The four festival films left all hail from Europe – the North and South American selections I saw being 
Having grown up in Germany I of course would seek out the German entries in the NewFest festival. There were only two, separated by 97 years. “Where Are You Going, Habibi?” (“Wo Willst Du Hin, Habibi”) is a good-natured comedy about an ethnic Turkish Berliner, comfortable with his homosexuality but not out to his family, who unwisely develops a mad crush on a blue-eyed blond ne’er-do-well, who is not only heterosexual, but also a small time criminal. No good can come out of it, except maybe, eventually, an unlikely friendship. This low-budget effort by Tor Iben humorously and sensitively navigates the expected and unexpected plot twists.
96 years earlier, German cinema produced what is believed to be the first sympathetic portrayal of homosexual life in movies: “Anders als die Andern” AKA “Different from the Others“. It was co-created 1919 by the head of the Institute for Sexual Science, Magnus Hirshfeld (who also plays a supporting role) as an “Aufklärungsfilm” (which literally means Explanation Film), an agitprop narrative designed to shed a sympathetic light on homosexuality and agitate against Paragraph 175, the German law which criminalized gay sex. In 1920 German authorities banned the movie, and the Nazis, who would exploit Paragraph 175 to devastating effects for homosexuals, later destroyed every known print. However, about 40 minutes worth of footage would be found in the Ukrainian print of an anthology film of the late 1920s into which Magnus Hirshfeld had edited in parts of “Different than the Others”. This found footage became the basis of a handsomely restored print screened at Newfest with superb live piano accompaniment (the excellent documentary “Paragraph 175” was also screened again).
with men dancing with men, women dancing with women, in all variety of genderfluid costumes, as well as a touching flashback segment of the violinist as a young man falling in love with his boarding school friend. The descriptions of the lost footage reveals the wider scope of the original movie, showing how both protagonists’ families deal differently with their sons’ homosexuality, the men’s doomed attempts at heterosexuality, and a prologue and epilogue connecting the hero to the fate of many (famous) homosexuals throughout history.
We’ll be traveling far and wide through space (Europe and South America) and time (1919 and 2040), but let’s start here and now in Ohio with the romantic drama of young gay lovers facing unexpected obstacles: “Akron“. It’s refreshing to see a love story between two male college students where the conflict is not their coming out or their ethnic differences. No, their families are both fully accepting and supportive of their sexuality and relationship. No trouble there … that is, until a family secret worthy of Sophocles (which is telegraphed early on in the movie but which I won’t spoil here) is revealed one by one to the characters and one by one, parents and sons alike deal with the bombshell in ways that are not admirable, but believable, threatening everybody’s love and happiness.
“I Love You Both” is another US indie about a twentysomething couple, in this case brother/sister twins Donny and Krystal, played by real life twins Doug and Kristin Archibald, who also wrote the screenplay (while Doug directed). The IMDb synopsis, “Krystal and her twin brother/roommate confront twenty-eight years of their codependency when they start dating the same guy”, deftly describes this often drolly funny, sometimes wistfully deadpan effort. In the Q & A after the screening Krystal Archibald explained the “I” in the title could refer to either of the siblings, or even their mother, but copped to push back from many audience members who came into the film expecting the bisexual love object of the twins to be the one saying “I love you both”, expressing their disappointment that the movie never actually explored that scenario nor developed the bisexual male love object as a fully fleshed out character. I felt disappointed at the end of the screening too, yet the problem with that disappointment is that I wanted the film to be something other than the film actually was setting out to be. But is it wrong to expect a movie called “I Love You Both” to more overtly explore a bisexual love triangle from the actual bisexual’s perspective? The working title for the film was “Quarterlife Crisis”, which describes the film we saw much more accurately, but may not be as enticing a title for audiences. Perhaps another title option can still be found, one that evokes the offbeat humor and low-key tenderness of the film without being off-putting or misdirecting.
Most of the NewFest films I saw will get little fanfare, which is why I hope writing about them on my little blog may help direct some attention to new indie and foreign LGBTQ movies. “Moonlight” is getting plenty of attention, but it may be in danger of getting marginalized the way movies about the African-American experience, or movies about LGBT people, or movies about drug addiction often do. That would be a shame and a loss to anyone who loves to see a great movie. I don’t think of myself as a critic, and frankly, there is not much I can add to A. O. Scott’s New York Times 
Unexpectedly, although so very different in many ways, “Moonlight” would have some key thematic and structural commonalities with “The Pass“, the Opening Night film of NewFest’s 2016 LGBT Film Festival. In addition to the theme of a man trying to deal with his homosexuality in a difficult environment, in the case of “The Pass” a star soccer player, both movies are based on plays and take on a distinct three act structure, each act separated by time lapses of 5 or more years. There are marked differences in how both films adapt the plays they are based on. According to A. O. Scott, in “Moonlight” “Mr. McCraney’s play is a layered and fractured collage of voices, and … (the director/adapter) Mr. Jenkins has adjusted the shape to the linear demands of narrative filmmaking” in creating three separate segments in three distinct time frames. “The Pass” presents three crucial moments in the life of soccer player Jason (Russell Tovey, Johnathan Groff’s boss/lover in HBO’s “Looking”) in uninterrupted real time within three contained spaces, very much like the play it is based on. But it is filmed and performed with such verve that it doesn’t feel “stagey”. As the playwright/screenwriter John Donnelly suggested during the Q & A that followed the NewFest premiere, “opening up” the play (as often happens when stage drama is adapted for the screen) may have sapped the narrative of its suspense and claustrophobic intensity. When a single cinematic “opening up” does occur at the end via a crucial flashback, the effect is devastatingly heartbreaking. “The Pass” haunted me with the tragic implications of its conclusion as much as the final image of grace in “Moonlight” filled me with the balm of hope.
Casa em Paraty is actually not on an island, as suggested by the movie, but along the shore of a lagoon that points deeply inland like a large maritime index finger, south of the town of Paraty along the coastline between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Ed and I explored this same coastline for several days during the first days of our first tour of Brazil together in 2012. It is a fantastically evocative landscape, with verdant mountains undulating to one side, and green islands protruding out of the waters like forested bubbles.
Yep, Blumenau, founded by Dr. Herrman Bruno Otto Blumenau and 17 other German immigrants 1850 in Southern Brazil and now home to about 300 000 souls, a fifth of which have German ancestry, claims the distinction of playing host to the biggest Oktoberfest celebration in the world after Munich, attracting up to a million tourists to its Bavarian bacchanal. Every other German city can just eat its Brazilian dust.
Quando eu te encarei frente a frente e não vi o meu rosto
Olinda is a beautiful historic town, one of the oldest in Brazil, founded 1535 in the state of Pernambuco. The large metropolitan capitol city of Recife looms just south, contrasting modern high rises at the horizon with the quaint colorful buildings and handsome churches of historic Olinda.
Salvador, in the state of Bahia, is a Brazilian city full of highs and lows. Quite literally, at first blush, due to its topography. The historic center sits on a high plateau separated by a steep cliff from a lower section of town at the shore. Which makes parts of Salvador look like a city on top of a city, like something dreamed up by Escher or Christopher Nolan (see top photo).
For our Brazilian musical selection, it is long past due that I share one of the most famous upbeat selections Brazil has gifted the world. You may not know the title “Mas Que Nada”, but you have surely heard this track’s lively chorus. Possibly no piece of music has been used more often as a shorthand to illustrate Brazilian high spirits.
Notes from a Composer 