“The Margin would be deemed every bit as integral to the history of the avant-garde as Meshes of the Afternoon. But how many have seen The Margin? Very few people saw the film in Brazil, let alone abroad, after its release in 1967, but many of its viewers were deeply inspired by it, and built Cinema Marginal off of its example, from essence to name. For those who know this hidden history, the film is totemic.”  – Slant Magazine

Cinema Marginal was the third and last phase of Brazil’s Cinema Novo (New Cinema), a film movement that took place over the course of a decade between the early 1960’s to the early 1970’s. Cinema Novo formed in response to the social unrest along racial and class lines in Brazil and the United States. Films from Cinema Marginal  focus on marginal characters and employ deliberately ‘bad’ aesthetics that borrow tropes from b-movies in order to appeal to a wider audience. 

Explore where the margins intersect and collide with the mainstream this Summer at an ultra rare 16mm film screening of A Margem (1967) by Ouzualdo R. Candeias! We’re delighted to partner with CineLimite and support their mission of expanding audiences for seminal Brazilian Cinema with this extra special screening in the UNDO LEAN-TO co-presented with Filmmakers Co-op and Spectacle Theater.  Join us in the backyard for an evening of celluloid, community and conversation. Following the film we’ll be joined in conversation by scholar / programmer Richard Peña with Cine Limite’s Eric Barroso and William Plotnick, and Spectacle Theater’s Isaac Hoff. 

“Filmed in Brazil, A Margem (1967) by Ouzualdo R. Candeias is the strange story (more or less) about two love stories… the film intends to show what happened to four people with no importance which, gave so much importance to love that they come to die for it… one day a colossal white barge appeared gliding on the serene and dirty waters of the Tiete river, bringing an unusual woman, a strange and beautiful woman. Four people were marked… the beautiful and unusual woman disappears as well as her white barge… without explanation. Since that day, the life of those people take different ways, i. e., their empty routine comes to an end. Among the four, comes to be, profound affection… loving and, maybe, suffering, they go on together. Some day the woman with her big barge appears again at the border of the same river, stopping at the same place… one by one the four persons have died loving… or died for having loved too much… the colossal canoe receives them in its white bulge and, led by the beautiful and strange woman, sails quiet and silently with its prow turned toward any or some other dimension in time… space or beyond.”

– The Film-makers’ Cooperative

Richard Peña is a Professor of Film Studies at Columbia University, where he specializes in film theory and international cinema. From 1988 to 2012, he was the Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Director of the New York Film Festival. At the Film Society, Richard Peña organized retrospectives of many film artists, including Michelangelo Antonioni, Sacha Guitry, Abbas Kiarostami, King Hu, Robert Aldrich, Roberto Gavaldon, Ritwik Ghatak, Kira Muratova, Fei Mu, Jean Eustache, Youssef Chahine, Yasujiro Ozu, Carlos Saura, Nagisa Oshima and Amitabh Bachchan, as well as major film series devoted to African, Israeli, Cuban, Polish, Hungarian, Chinese, Arab, Korean, Swedish, Turkish, German, Taiwanese and Argentine cinema. Together with Unifrance, he created in 1995 “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema,” the leading American showcase for new French cinema. A frequent lecturer on film internationally, in 2014-2015, he was a Visiting Professor in Brazilian Studies at Princeton, and in 2015-2016 a Visiting Professor in Film Studies at Harvard. In May, 2016, he was the recipient of the “Cathedra Bergman” at the UNAM in Mexico City, where he offered a three-part lecture series “On the Margins of American Cinema,” and December, 2017, gave a course in “International Cinema After 1990” at Beijing University. In 2020, he will be a Visiting Professor at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He also currently hosts WNET/Channel 13’s weekly Reel 13.

Eric Barroso is a NYC-based film programmer and critic. He is CEO/editor-in-chief of Cinelimite and has programmed films at Spectacle Theater and UnionDocs.

William Plotnick is the Executive Director of Cinelimite, a non-profit foundation dedicated to expanding access to the history of Brazilian Cinema in the United States. William is a current graduate student at New York University’s MIAP program. He holds a Master’s degree in Cinema Studies from Columbia University and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts in Comparative Literature.

Isaac Hoff is a filmmaker, editor, and programmer who lives in Brooklyn, New York. His work has screened in venues across New York City including Roxy Cinema, Anthology Film Archives, and The Emily Harvey Foundation. His programming includes the first US retrospective of Cinema Marginal filmmaker, Rogerio Sganzerla which took place at Spectacle Theater in 2019.