Rosa Dias

For this behemoth, Bressane took his opera omnia and edited it in an order that first adheres to historical chronology but soon starts to move backwards and forward. The various pasts – the 60s, the 80s, the 2000s – comment on each other in a way that sheds light on Bressane’s themes and obsessions, which become increasingly apparent and finally, a whole idea of cinema reveals itself to the curious and patient viewer. Will Bressane, from now on, rework The Long Voyage of the Yellow Bus when he makes another film? Is this his latest beginning? Why not, for the eternally young master maverick seems to embark on a maiden voyage with each and every new film!

Based upon the life story of Father Antonio Vieira, born in Lisbon in 1608 and deceased in Salvador, Bahia, in 1697. He's considered the first Brazilian writer and one of the most important aesthete of linguistic and of the Portuguese language of all times, a master in the art of metaphor, of verbal relations and analogy. He was persecuted and condemned by the Portuguese Court of Inquisition due to his position against native slavery, against the intolerance to the Jewish people and to the colonial politics of exploration.

Sentimental Education centers on the unique relationship between Áurea, a lonely 40 year old teacher, and a young man she has just met by chance – one of these encounters which mythology and literature are full of. A delicate soul who finds itself attracted to a beauty that seems to demand, disturb and move her. That shakes her up entirely. During the days following their first conversation, she will expose all her feelings through classes in which he will let himself be carried away. Until an unusual episode from the past is revealed and changes everything.

A cinematographic essay, without dialogues, about the months Nietszche spent in Turin, Italy, with narration quoted by his original writings.

A silent film shot in New York in 1972, including scenes in Hélio Oiticica’s apartment. Last film made in exile by Bressane, it mimics the experimental concept of "quasi-cinema" by Hélio Oiticica. It consists of a fragmentary experience of freedom, in super-8 and 16mm, in a code out of time, out of the square, while recreating (with different cameras) the wild and sensitive look that Oiticica dedicated to cinema. Its definitive 71-minute restored version was completed in the early 2000s.

The history of Brazilian popular music in the 20th Century, focusing specially on the life and works of intriguing singer Mário Reis, a loner who, with his special way of singing - whispering and softly saying the words - in a time when singers with potent voices ruled, was in a way a forerunner of Bossa Nova style.

A curious couple, whose existence takes place where art arises along a singular metaphysical desire. They search for it through repeated and varied representations, in a setting of light where hope and desperation blend together.

A montage of 48 Brazilian films made between 1898 and 2022. The moments, the frames, where we feel a glimmer, an innovation, some experimentation and emotion coming to us at different times. A fine thread that runs through cinema since its birth, and even before.

A delicate and tenacious writer, widowed three years ago, engages in frequent conversations with a parrot. However, she’s always observed by a large portion of raw meat.

Bressane's second London film, shot in six days in his apartment. "I had seen the French avant-garde films of the 1920's and naturally the title cites Breton. But underneath it can also be read in many ways. It is a cinema that is invented on the spur of the moment, like you invent an instrument to play music and then abandon it. This film came out like an improvisation, a total risk. It is a deconstruction of meaning but not in the analytical, intellectual sense. I have always tried to lose myself with my films. There is no trace of American or French underground cinema. If anything, it is the idea of home movies, there were many ideas for digital films long before digital film existed. This film made itself, it was like a jazz improvisation. Amor Louco is a lost object, it doesn't speak any language, it has no signs, no letters, no captions. And in the scene where the cataract is cut with the razor blade, it was the adventure of the film itself that was put to the test".

"They are combinations of fragments. There are no stories, it is possible to mount these fragments in many ways. »Cine-eye or cine-voice-eye. The text of the Galaxies goes straight to the image. »A text rewritten for the eye» (H. de Campos). A short film that is more than experimental and that is based on a dark aesthetic that takes from the work of poet Haroldo de Campos its "dark matter" to combine it with the filmmaker's rarefied images and the puppet-like markings of actresses Bete Coelho and Mariana de Moraes.

The names of the characters are pronouns. She is a teacher, with his father dead just three days ago. Faced with this situation, He intends to take care of her while He is alive. This is the beginning of an odd relationship.

Three friends, Hilda, Matilda and Gaspar, meet in a rundown downtown apartment during a weekend to chat, drink and experience pleasure.

Two women, long-time friends, embark on a love story. They are writers who do not write to publish but for themselves. Their mutual conversation, their desires, the risks and phantoms of existence, the privilege of the wounded and of condemnation, traverse their speech, are a confession.

In a movie studio, the actors are getting made up and the crew is waiting to begin shooting the film. Grande Otelo, the bungling "king of the deck", and Marta Anderson, the blond and provocative star of the show, recite in the historical scenario of the chanchadas, the abandoned studios of Cinédia. "The photography is splendid, it is a sort of parallel song, of critique, of parody, of understanding of a certain light typical of Brazilian cinema of the times, already re-created, already stylized. And with the older actors, Otelo, Lewgoy and the others, something very important happened in the artistic perception, seeing again, doing again, it was already a concrete metalanguage" (J. Bressane).

Bressane (together with his partner Rosa Dias and young filmmaker Rodrigo Lima) guide us through the beautiful Swiss Sils Maria, where Nietzsche spent no less than eight summers. In his letters, Nietzsche indicates which spots brought him to a different understanding of philosophy. He discovered, beyond the philosophical text, a source for ideas in the pure air, in the mountain landscapes, in the water of the lakes, and in the age-old forests.

In September 2007 Júlio Bressane goes to Ferrara. In the cemetery of the Italian city he ends up making two movies.

It is a film about the deep Brazil, not Brazil as a society, state or experience; it is a film about a geological, prehistoric and pre-logical Brazil. The adventures of the Caribbean monster, its wanderings along a virgin beach evoke, before Brazil, the artistic wanderings of a filmmaker in constant friction and, why not say, struggle against the mommy-daddy cinema, produced without taste, without joy and without adventure.

A 1972 Portuguese language drama/adventure film written and directed by Júlio Bressane, starring Rosa Dias and Elyseu Visconti.

We see the film, not the cinema; cinema remains hidden within the film. Cinema is the Phantom of the Opera. A movement and a moment of transition, the Phantom fades away with each opera. It disappears and then reemerges in another, and another, and another, and yet another opera.