Sertão

IMAGINATION 255
in Brazil each year, to about 10 million consumers. This means
that only 6 per cent of the Brazilian population goes to the cinema.
There are some 1400 cinema theatres in Brazil.’ Since the
mid-1980s, ‘the public is no longer going to the cinema as a consequence
of the worsening economic recession and its resulting,
growing and perverse concentration of income, which excludes
the vast majority of Brazilians from today’s consumer society.’
8
In the tale recounted in Terra estrangeira, a Brazilian girl Alex, who
has emigrated to Portugal, sells her passport (a Brazilian passport,
according to the buyer, is worthless), and she says she pities the
Portuguese (because after the great effort of crossing the ocean
they ended up discovering Brazil). When Alex acts and speaks in
this way she is not only behaving correctly within the context of
the story being narrated, but she is also, and primarily, expressing
through drama a feeling that was common among young people
of the Brazilian middle class at the beginning of the 1990s. The
tale on screen relives in other dimensions what both the audience
and characters of the film experienced in reality, namely the sense
of belonging to a country that is no good, of having neither roots
nor identity, of living in your own land as if it were a foreign land,
of surviving (and here I borrow from two particular images in the
film) like a ship stranded on a sand bank and like a car making a
break for the border.
9
Let’s imagine an image that is interested not exactly in revealing
what it sees but rather its way of seeing. And let’s even imagine
that Central do Brasil looks at the story that it recounts, that of a
retired teacher who earns a living by writing letters for people who
do not know how to read, in a way that allows us to observe her as
if she were a metaphor for the renaissance of Brazilian Cinema in
the mid-1990s, after the paralysis caused by the corruption of the
Collor government between 1990 and 1993. The story of Dora and
Josué was not dreamed up with such a metaphor in mind, but (at
least after understanding the essential message of the film) it can
be read in this way, as a revival of the art of seeing. Once again
Brazilians could tell stories in a language which belonged to all of
them. They could rediscover their country and feel part of a specific
space and time. The film includes scenes of landscapes and