News

Gabriel Mascaro. Photo by Beto Figueiroa.Similarly to the “slow cinema” fad of international art-house cinema, the docufiction format and variations of the fiction and documentary marriage seem to be in high demand by festival programmers, judging by last year´s Locarno and this year´s Rotterdam programs. The plethora of films at the intersection of both realms, resulting in a blending of cinematic strategies, styles and codes of both formats, span a wide spectrum of options from audience-pleasers like Kaweh Modiri´s Bodkin Ras to avangardishly-tuned Pietro Marcello´s Lost and Beautiful. Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro also fits the label, currently dominating the festival circuit with award-reaping Neon Bull, which sees its release in the Us cinemas on April 8, followed by a retrospective devoted to the director at New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center. Mascaro was born in north-eastern region of Brazil in Recife, the capital and the...

It's not quite The Help (I only use that because it seems to have become the standard by which all films about maids are now compared). Here's the filmmaker's approach intrigues me, and I'd like to see what the end result looks, sounds and feels like. It's titled Doméstica (or Housemaids), a seemingly provocative feature-length documentary by Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro. It's a project we've been tracking since first writing about it last fall, and a first full trailer has surfaced, giving us a much better look at what to expect. Mascaro's approach involved giving video cameras to 7 adolescents from six Brazilian locales, and asked them to film...

First, recapping what I wrote in my initial profile of the film last week... It's not quite The Help; the filmmaker's approach intrigues me, and I'd like to see what the end result looks, sounds and feels like. It's titled Doméstica (or Housemaids), a seemingly provocative feature-length documentary by Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro. Mascaro's approach involved giving video cameras to seven adolescents from six Brazilian locales and asked them to film their family's maids for a week, all day, everyday, for 7 straight days. So it's kind of what you'd call an observational documentary, capturing the diversity of employee...

It's not quite The Help; the filmmaker's approach intrigues me, and I'd like to see what the end result looks, sounds and feels like. It's titled Doméstica (or Housemaids), a seemingly provocative feature-length documentary by Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro. Mascaro's approach involved giving video cameras to seven adolescents from six Brazilian locales and asked them to film their family's maids for a week, all day, everyday, for 7 straight days. So it's kind of what you'd call an observational documentary, capturing the diversity of employee attitudes towards their maids, the relationship between each maid and the house they...