Jogo de Cena

The friction between truth and fiction and the power of performance to dissolve the difference between the two have long been subjects of some fascination to Brazilian director Eduardo Coutinho. His breakthrough 1984 film Twenty Years Later, for example, is a hybrid of narrative and documentary footage shot two decades apart. What Coutinho began in 1964 as a straightforward retelling of the murder of a labour organizer winds up, 20 years later, as a meta-exercise reflecting on the role this unfinished feature played in the lives of its cast when shooting was shut down by the Brazilian government. Jogo de Cena is Coutinho's most concentrated exploration of the question, "What is real?"
An advertisement in a newspaper invites women in Rio de Janeiro to come and tell their stories on camera. These interviews take place in an empty theatre with a camera rolling. Later, the stories these women tell are reiterated by a series of actresses, shot in the same empty theatre. Who is "acting" and who is "telling" is left unspecified by Coutinho as he interweaves the monologues- identical sentences spoken by two different women, in two different ways, jam up against each other in a series of jump cuts, and unless viewers instantly recognize one of the actresses, they will have a hard time deciphering the real from the fake. Coutinho's aim is to explore those two categories, and if that sounds like a rather dry intellectual stunt, rest assured, his methods make Jogo de Cena moving and surprisingly suspenseful.

The Film was nominated for Best Actress, Best Documentary, Best Editing - Documentary, Best Original Screenplay awards at the Cinema Brazil Grand Prize in 2008, and won the Best Director of a Documentary Award and Best Documentary Award at the Prêmio Contigo Cinema Brazil (2008), as well as the APCA Trophy for Best Film at the São Paulo Association of Art Critics Awards (2008).

Cast:
Marília Pêra
Andrea Beltrão
Fernanda Torres
Aleta Gomes Vieira

Director: Eduardo Coutinho
Writer: N/A
Runtime: 100 min
Genre: Documentary
Language: Portuguese
Production Year: 2007

The screening is part of the 9th Brazilian Film Festival