NEW WAVE

Atlantic waves have taken to new shores. No, we’re not talking about another unexpected natural phenomenon. The Atlantic has expanded – musically. The seventh edition of the Atlantic Waves Festival is set to take place in London. The festival started off in 2001 with the slogan “Exploratory music from Portugal”, but this was changed in 2006 to “Exploratory music from Portugal and beyond”. This year, the event has taken on a new, more global feel and is now entitled the “London International Festival of Exploratory Music”.

The change isn’t superficial, either. This year’s line-up includes over 70 artists from 21 different countries – from Lithuania to Japan. Portuguese-speaking countries are still represented, with artists from Brasil, Angola, Cape Verde and Portugal all taking part. As well as being culturally diverse, Atlantic Waves offers an array of musical styles. Over the eight days of the festival, two nights will include a more traditional line-up: one dedicated to the great divas of fado and another to the virtuoso Portuguese acoustic guitar.

But the more contemporary side of the festival will draw in the crowds this year. Clubnights will promote the cream of dance music, with DJs from across the world playing the best in soundclash, techno/eletro and guettotrash. If the genres all sound a bit strange, the guest artists making an appearance should certainly make a big impression. Three of the top DJs in Brasil, Mau Mau, Anderson Noise and Marlboro are set to play at Cargo. Tune in, turn on and try not to drop off as you lap up the waves on the beach. 

Atlantic Waves
1-11th November
ATLANTICWAVES.ORG.UK

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At first glance, Bajofondo Tango Club seem like just another band on the “electrotango” scene, which emmerged at the beginning of the milenium and includes artists like Gotan Project,  Tanghetto and the excellent Narcotango. But Bajofondo have an ace up their sleeve that sets them apart from the rest: Gustavo Santaolalla, the Argentinean composer and producer who won two Oscars (one for the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack and the other for his work on Babel) and who founded Bajofondo together with Juan Campodonico, a Uruguayan musician who was already sampling Astor Piazolla in the ‘90s. Santaolalla’s genius is summed up on Bajofondo’s first album (Bajofondo Tango Club, 2002).

The band, a veritable collective of different musicians and artists, will be playing at the Roundhouse in London on the 21st October (they’ll also go on to perform in Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, Coventry and Brighton) to present their latest album (you can check out our review of Mar Dulce on the poster attached to the middle of the magazine).
 
Bajofondo
21st October
Roundhouse
www.roundhouse.org.uk

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Godard once said that “movies are a world of fragments”. In the 51st BFI Film Festival it is the world which is fragmented through the eyes of film makers from 42 different countries brought together in a festival as diverse and multicultural as the city hosting it. The official selection turns out to be rather tentative: the panel chose 133 short and 184 feature-length films from 4,000. The principal concern for Sandra Hebron, the festival’s artistic director, was “to select films which showed another way of looking at the world”.

Mission accomplished. Among the numerous tales to be told during the festival there is the opportunity to catch a train to India to find your spiritual self (The Darjeeling Limited by Wes Anderson) or to take part in an adventure in as far away as Alaska (Into the Wild, by Sean Penn). If rock ‘n’ roll is more your thing, then why not take a trip into the world of Bob Dylan (I’m Not There, by Todd Haynes). Or who knows, discover the secrets of meditation by having a chat with the director David Lynch and the musician Donovan. In short, in the world of cinema, anything is possible.

Something else which makes this 51st edition of the festival a typically London affair is that it follows the current trends in cinema. Among the more than 40 countries represented at the festival there is clearly an emphasis on Mexican, Japanese and Korean cinema, a trend which is becoming continually stronger amongst fans and critics of the seventh art.

Godard, in the end, was right. Movies certainly are a world of fragments. And cinema, at least in this London festival, seems to be taking these pieces and turning them into a kaleidoscope of colour.

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POWERPUFF WOMEN

To paraphrase the writer Anais N’in, photographer Claudia Ferreira is, above all, a woman. Involved in the feminist movement since the ‘80s, Ferreira noticed that “the movement had a libertarian spirit, an originality and a sense of humour that pervaded the serious claims it was making. I’d never seen this in a political movement before”, she reveals. Perhaps that´s why the images that make up the exhibition Women and Movements, a testament to the active role women played in the redemocratization of Latin America during the ‘90s, are so compelling.

The 20 black and white photos offer an intimate portrait of the Latin feminist movement, offering a glimpse of the daily lives of these women as they fight for their beliefs. “I’m looking for the soul of this collective political project”, reveals Claudia. Women and Movements portrays women of differing ages, ethnic backgrounds and socio-economic conditions. According to the photographer, her role is “to visually chart a movement that enabled women to occupy a greater space in society and to live in a culture that defends human rights, not discrimination”, she explains.

Women and Movements
2 Oct – 3 November, free
Riverside Studios
mulheresemovimentos.com.br


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DEFYING HITCHCOCK

Perhaps one of the most contraversial statements ever made by Alfred Hitchcock had to do with his opinion on the relationship between literature and film. “It’s hard to turn a good book into a good film”, claimed the British director. For Brasilian Nelson Pereira dos Santos, the first film director to be a member of the Brasilian Academy of Letters and the author of several cinematic adaptations of Brasilian novels, this statement is overly simplistic. Nelson, who has come to London for the Cinema Brazil – Literature into Film Festival, took time out to speak with Jungle about the matter.

You’ve adapted works by Guimarães Rosa, Gilberto Freyre and other major names in Brasilian literature. How do you transform a novel into a film script?

For me, the best way of doing things is to embody the story to such an extent that I feel as if I’ve come up with it my self. At the end of the day, I’m just appropriating someone else’s work. There comes a point when I’ve read the story so many times that I begin to live it. Afterwards, the work consists of editing everything down. I think about how to be concise whilst always maintaining the spirit and the content of the original. And afterwards you have to think about the work’s narrative structure, and whether or not there’s any way of creating a similar effect on screen.

You created the ABL Award for film adaptations of literary works. Which films have caught your attention recently?

This was the first year of the awards. The idea was to chose films that have been released commercially and then put together a commission of experts to examine them. The award goes to the best literary adaptation. This year, two films were chosen: Beto Brant’s Crime Delicado and José Jofilly’s Achados e Perdidos. The idea was to give the prize to the scriptwriter.

You’ve adapted works by Freyre and Sérgio Buarque, researchers who’ve tried to reveal the roots of Brasil‘s culture and national identity. After having worked on these adaptations, how would you define a typically Brasilian sense of identity?

Nowadays at the Academy, people are talking a lot about Brasilian identity, and obviously Gilberto Freyre and Sérgio Buarque are obligatory references when it comes to discussing the subject. I’m currently working on deconstructing concepts related to this issue. During the debates we’ve had, we’ve ended up agreeing that it’s a waste of time searching for a ”Brasilian“ sense of identity, because we don’t have just one identity, we’re a multicultural nation – which is a principal that Freyre himself established. So this search for a sense of identity could well be a complete waste of time.

Cinema Brasil
4th- 11th October
Barbican Centre
www.barbican.org.uk

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FAVELA FEVER

What many people consider to be the best film of the year hasn’t even been released yet – in the cinema. But JungleDrums managed to get a copy of the film and checked out the explicit portrayal of the methods used by the BOPE (Special Police Operations Battalion) in Rio de Janeiro.

Picture this: the police want to discover the whereabouts of a major drug dealer. They search the house of a young man and find a new pair of trainers. The young man says that he was given them as a present. The Squad decide to torture the boy in a variety of different ways: they put a plastic bag over his head until he almost suffocates. When they take the plastic bag off, they start punching him and asking him about the whereabouts of the chief drug trafficker. The young man remains silent. The police pick up a broom stick, pull down the boys trousers, and...

We’re not going to tell you what happens next, but you’ll end up watching it, sooner or later.

The film has been a major seller for some time now on the pirate DVD stalls that litter major cities across Brasil. The pirate copy has sold at an alarming rate – which could have had a negative impact on the film’s distribution– but has actually ended up helping to promote the film. People who haven’t seen it yet are all dying to, which is lucky for director José Padilha, who also directed Bus 174, which was a critical success but had little commercial impact, a problem that Elite Squad doesn’t look like facing.

The Brasilian and international press have all commented. Some say that Elite Squad is better than City of God. Others say that the film promotes torture. People have spoken out both for and against the film, but the most important thing is that Elite Squad has got people talking in the first place. And as this issue coincides with the London Film Festival, Jungle felt obliged to speak out as well. The buzz around Elite Squad is spreading like wildfire.


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GUI BORATTO

In an interview for the Deutsche Welle magazine, Brazilian Gui Boratto compared techno-minimalist music to works by the architect Oscar Niemeyer. This comparison may seem a bit non sense, but for Gui it’s just another similarity between architecture and music. Architect by education and music by choice, he doesn’t hide the relationship between the shapes, the spaces (and obviously the mathematics). Fan of Leonardo da Vinci, whom he calls “God on Earth”, he admires the artist’s passion for nature. Maybe it was this feature that influenced Gui to bring something quite organic in his harmonies and the reason why some people categorise his music as emo-techno. “I think that is a mixture of various styles. Some say it’s emo-techno, neo-trance, who knows. I think this categorisation is stupid. What’s important is whether it’s any good or not. You can find good music in any style”.

One of the few composers and producers of techno music in Brazil, he’s already worked with a variety of artists (Pato Banton, Manu Chao, just to mention a few) and he’s the Brazilian representative for the renowned German label, Kompakt. “I think there are so few producers in Brazil because the equipment has always been so expensive for Brazilians. As far as I’m concerned it’s strange being part of a market where I’m one of the few representatives. Things would be much improved if others came onto the scene”.

To make sure this happens, Gui does his part. This year he’s launched two discs for European labels, Addicted Volume 2 on Platipus Records and the album Chromophobia on Kompakt, the latter chosen by British magazine MixMag as the best album for the month of April. Besides this, go onto the producer’s concert line up in his site and you will see he’s everywhere – from small towns in Brazil to the party centres of London and Amsterdam. Da Vinci and Niemeyer have proved to be a good influence when talking about quality music.

Gui Boratto
27th October
Fabric


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ORKUT VERSUS FACEBOOK

Three years ago “bad, bad Server, no donut for you”, had people across the world frowning and groaning in front of their computer screens. Orkut-fever had taken Brasil by storm: everyone wanted a great profile, thousands of friends, communities, fans, hearts and ice cubes. After all, everyone wants to be “cool”, until businesses started blocking access to the site during work hours, potential employers started looking at candidates profiles online and people started to delete everything on their messages page in search of “privacy”. And it started being cooler to have less friends, communities and messages – in other words, less of your life exposed online. Now the UK is going through a similar situation with Facebook. JD tried out both sites and reveals the pros and cons of both.

Orkut

What is it?: The 8th most visited site in the world
Began: January 2004
Users: Over 67 million
Most popular: In Brasil, which has more than 40 million users
Official Language: Portuguese
Pros: Easy to find friends and communities, familiarity with themes discussed and new tools added frequently
Cons: Large amount of spam and fake profiles, lack of privacy and limited number of friends and photos in your album.
Trivia: despite being used mainly by Brasilians, there are also a large number of Indian users, which sparked contraversy when the site’s official language changed from English into Portuguese.


Facebook

What is it?: 17th most visited site in the world
Began: February 2004
Users: Over 34 million
Most popular: In London, Uk, where there are over a million users
Official language: English
Pros: Privacy (the only people whio can see your complete profile are friends) site restricted to universities and businesses, easier to organize your photos and Marketplace ( a kind of classifieds)
Cons: Small amount of communities, sale of personal information to third parties, friends updated about everything new you do online, inability to close account.
Trivia: Initially set up as a means of communication between Harvard graduates, today the majority of users are British.

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