In the Signals section's theme program "The Mouth of Garbage," the International Film Festival Rotterdam will present a vast panorama of features and shorts from São Paulo's so-called "Boca do Lixo" (Mouth of Garbage), the nickname for the working class neighborhood in the center of the Brazilian metropolis. These quick and dirty productions frequently highlighted the sleazy underbelly of Brazilian society using established genres such as noir, horror, the western, and pornography.

In the Boca do Lixo district a constellation of entrepreneurial producers and up-and-coming filmmakers came together to create low-budget films in the mid 1960s, remaining active for nearly thirty years. An accessible option to burgeoning directors who felt excluded from high-end studio filmmaking and elite artistic movements such as Cinema Novo, the Boca do Lixo yielded some of Brazilian filmmaking's chief talents, among them: Rogério Sganzerla, Carlos Reichenbach, José Mojica Marins (Coffin Joe), Ozualdo Candeias, and others.

Despite the fact that several of the Boca films were hugely successful with national audiences, producers at the time found themselves fighting constantly against government censors and the constraints of a distribution landscape saturated with Hollywood product. Some films managed to cleverly elude government control and market limitations even as they presented a fiercely critical outlook; others were banned or phased-out of the commercial distribution circuit outright. As a result, large portions of the films associated with the Boca have remained elusive.

Featured Works:

The International Film Festival Rotterdam presents about eighteen films in tribute to the Boca do Lixo, including rare works by João S. Trevisan, Claudio Cunha, Ody Fraga, and Jean Garret, many of them presented in new transfers made from the films' original 35mm negatives.

Program information:

Signals: The Mouth of Garbage Unearths São Paulo's '60s, '70s and '80s Low-Budget Film Culture