HECTOR BABENCO

Leon Cakoff Prize 2013

The cinema of Hector Babenco is the cinema of versatility. His oeuvre achieves the miracle of combining the real life rawness and societal injustices with a sense of urgency regarding drama and emotion. Since the beginning, his trajectory crosses paths with Mostra’s. Still early in his career, his second feature film, the audacious Lucio Flavio, was selected to be part of a a line-up consisting of only 23 films that were screened during the 1st Mostra in 1977. Channeling the public’s dissatisfaction with the authoritarianism of military dictatorship, the film won the festival’s Audience Award – in one of the rare moments when the public was able cast their votes during Brazilian military dictatorship.

Babenco was born in Buenos Aires and became a Brazilian citizen in 1970. At the age of 17, he travelled through the capitals of Europe and later moved to São Paulo in order to dedicate himself exclusively to film. He began as an executive producer and co-directed O Fabuloso Fittipaldi with Roberto Farias in 1973. His feature film debut was King of the Night in 1976. Pixote (1980, 18th Mostra), a cruel portrayal of abandoned minors in the streets of São Paulo, brought him to international prominence. To this day, it holds up as one of the strongest depictions of the dehumanization process caused by accelerated urbanization, ignoring the ones who were excluded. Nominated for a best foreign film Golden Globe, the film shows up in many lists by international critics ranking the best movies of the 80s. With Pixote’s success, Bacenco began a successful international career. Produced right after the peak of Latin American political repression, Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985, 9th Mostra) narrates the relationship between a political prisoner and a homosexual who must share a cell in another perfect mix of political context, fantasy and sensibility. An international success, the film gave William Hurt a best actor prize at Cannes, as well as an Oscar, with Babenco himself receiving a best director Oscar nomination. In 1987, he directed Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep in Ironweed, a film that gave both actors an Oscar nomination.

Courageously, Babenco went to the Amazon rainforest for months to film At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991). Foolish Heart (1996), a personal film with an emotional lyricism, led to him to compete once again for the Palm d’Or at Cannes.

The social injustices of poverty-stricken Brazil would interest him once again in Carandiru (2003), an adaptation of the book by Dráuzio Varella and one of the most commercially successful films of Brazilian cinema after the 1994 retake, with over four million viewers. The film even gave origin to the television series Carandiru, Outras Histórias (2005), airing on Globo TV, with Babenco himself directing two of the episodes.

Among friends, Babenco is also known for his good mood and a sharp, ironic sense of humor. In 2007, when asked to come up with the 31st Mostra’s artwork, he posed in the center of São Paulo while carrying a sign – a reference to Pietro Maria Bardi, former MASP director, who went out to the streets doing the same thing in order to promote the 7th edition of the Mostra in 1983. His dramatic film The Past, an adaptation of Argentine author Alan Pauls’ poignant novel starring Gael García Bernal, was the opening film of that year’s Mostra.

For his humanist trajectory in cinema and precise and courageous handling of delicate subjects and themes, Mostra will grant Hector Babenco the Leon Cakoff Prize.

43ª MOSTRA INTERNACIONAL DE CINEMA

43ª MOSTRA INTERNACIONAL DE CINEMA