I remember the first time I became aware of Brazilian director Carlos Diegues (1940-2025). It was at the 8th Telluride Film Festival in the Fall of 1981 where he was the focus of a special tribute (the other two were Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavejev and Hollywood character actors featuring Margaret Hamilton, Woody Strode, John Carradine and Elisha Cook Jr.). A mini-retrospective of Diegues’s films were shown with the director in attendance and included Ganga Zumba (1963), A Grande Cidade aka The Big City (1966) and Xica de Silva (1976), an exuberant social comedy about a 18th century black slave who achieves her liberation through political and sexual means. Xica de Silva was the only Diegues movie I saw at the festival but its colorful art direction, playful mix of history and fiction and a music score by Jorge Ben and Roberto Menescal made a strong impression. It was only later in 1981 that I saw Bye Bye Brazil (1980), Diegues’s art house breakthrough hit, and realized what an important figure he was in Brazilian cinema. Prior to this, the only movie from Brazil I had seen was Black Orpheus (1959) and that was an international co-production between France, Brazil and Italy.
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