Welcome to São Paulo

São Paulo International Film Festival invited several international film directors that were present in São Paulo in its last edition, in 2003, to begin the project of a feature film with visions on the city, raising the importance of the foreign glance with focus on the peculiarities of our metropolis, the third largest city in the world. The result is Bem-Vindo a São Paulo / Welcome to São Paulo, which is having its world premiere in the 28th São Paulo International Film Festival in São Paulo (October 22 to November 4, 2004). All the feature is given prestige to by the narration in Caetano Veloso?s voice, that also signs one of the segments of the project. São Paulo is the largest city of the Southern Hemisphere, with an incessant dynamics of cultural mixtures, with immigrants of all the world and migrants of all parts of Brazil.

The gathering of these peculiarities are seen through to the following film directors?s sensibilities and their present segments in the feature film Welcome to São Paulo, in the presentation order that proceeds:

MARCO ZERO / GROUND ZERO, by Phillip Noyce (AUSTRALIA) - With several testimonials about the peculiarities of São Paulo, the metropolis that hides social, cultural and ethnic differences, all around the ground zero of the city, in the whereabouts of Sé?s Cathedral. Phllip Noyce?s nervous camera registers a curious tourism, with a group of students in a trip by the historical center of São Paulo and a biblical preacher of the new era, preaching out of the conventional Catholic cathedral and with a sense of drama close to the aesthetics of Glauber Rocha?s Terra em Transe.

NATUREZA-MORTA / STILL LIFE, by Renata de Almieda and Leon Cakoff (BRAZIL). The documentation of a photographic exhibition, with several generations of spectators, contemplates on the importance of memory and it points out the fright before the irreversibility of time.

MANHÃ DE DOMINGO / SUNDAY MORNING, by Mika Kaurismäki (FINLAND). Documents on the remote and vague time of the metropolis, known by its agitations, with its slow awakening on a Sunday morning. A sensitive counterpoint about the occupation of spaces usually invisible in the chaotic days of the week.

NOVO MUNDO / NEW WORLD, by Jim McBride (USA). At the same time in which the director?s glance travels by neighborhoods of glorious past and deteriorated landscapes of São Paulo, a touching resistance is observed in its color and in its inhabitants? daily life. The chronicle reinforces that the landscape that resists guards the memories of a homelike past; the culture that resists is that one we don?t want to see".

"ENSAIO GERAL / A REHEARSAL FOR ALL"

43ª MOSTRA INTERNACIONAL DE CINEMA

43ª MOSTRA INTERNACIONAL DE CINEMA