Projeto Paradiso Fights for Brazilian Film Industry
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BERLIN — Having slowed incentives to a near halt this year, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s government looks set to decimate film funding in 2020. Brazil’s industry is bracing – and fighting back.
On Sunday, at Berlin, Projeto Paradiso, a philanthropic organization, announced a Sao Paulo Forum, New Business Models for a New Audiovisual Era, and that it was backing the participation of Brazil’s Clarisse Goulart, from Rio de Janeiro’s Conspiraçao Filmes, at Less is More, a European program coaching development executives.
Projeto Paradiso, is also supporting the attendance at Berlin of filmmakers behind 11 selected movies or projects from “All the Dead Ones’” Caetano Gotardo and Marco Dutta downwards.
Project Paradise will never have anywhere near the budget of Brazil’s massive Audiovisual Sector Fund, whose very existence is now challenged by Bolsonaro. But it is investing in the industry precisely where money goes furthest – development and distribution – and targets what the burgeoning content industry prizes most: New talent.
Founded in March 2019 by Olga Rabinovich, the non-profit Projeto Paradiso has already sent Brazilian talent to Germany (Next Wave, DFFB), Colombia (BAM), Cuba (EICTV), the U.S. (Stony Brook University), Slovakia (Pop Up Residency), France (Biarritz BAL-LAB), Italy (Torino Film Lab, Biennale College of Venice), Luxembourg (EAVE), Mexico (Cine Qua Non Lab, Locarno Industry Morelia).
Its Sao Paulo Forum will debate “new financing opportunities, public funding or the lack thereof, private funds, philanthropy and non-profits, spectator-based support, disruption and entrepreneurship, servicing vs IP, streamers and the hate-love relationship cinema has with them,” said Josephine Bourgois, executive director of the Olga Rabinovich Institute. Johanna Koljonen, author of the Göteborg Festival’s Nostradamus Report, will attend the first night.
Projeto Paradise is already building critical mass in a new knowledge economy, and associated with exciting new talent. “Shine Your Eyes,” the first fiction film by Matías Marini, who was “key to the creation of Projeto Paradiso, especially on the international front,” said Bourgois, hit Berlin as one of the buzziest Brazilian movies in Panorama.
There’s good word of mouth too on melodrama/road-movie “Campo Amor Rocha, written by Yuri Peixoto, just 22, and a recipient of Incubator Paraiso funding, and to be directed by Nina Kipko, A.D. to Karim Aïnouz on “Invisible Life,” and a tutor at Fortaleza’s CENA 15 Screenwriting LAB, set up by Aïnouz, Sérgio Machado and Marcelo Gomes. Such new blood may be lifeblood for Brazil in the future.
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