Luiz Rosemberg Filho
1943-2019
The trajectory of the Brazilian filmmaker Luiz Rosemberg Filho has been marked by the disconcerting pace of those who are constantly out of step. In a week where Brazilian cinema made the front page for winning important awards at Festival de Cannes, history mourned Rosemberg’s death recalling a less euphoric memory of the Croisette: in 1978, Crônica de um Industrial / Chronicle of an Industrialist, directed by Rosemberg, was selected for the festival, but ended up blocked from being screened by the Brazilian censorship. By then, the director was no stranger to state brutality. A non-conformist in the most literal sense of the term, Rosemberg had seen his previous film, A$suntina das Amérikas (1976), be censored in total, and his debut feature film, O Jardim das Espumas / Foam Garden 1971, become a landmark of Brazilian Marginal Cinema, famously defined by Glauber Rocha as “a well-seasoned soup of rocks,” even though it had barely been seen: censored at the time of its release, the film had been considered lost since the mid-1980s (Rosemberg himself used to say the producer made a broom out of the negatives). After the exploitation experiment O Santo e a Vedete /The Saint and th…
Films