Marcelo Machado
Brazil | 2012 | 87 min
Languages : English, French, Portuguese
Subtitle : English
This carefully researched film investigates the cultural movement which began in Brazil in the late 1960s as a reaction to the popular music and nationalism of the period. Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé (and others) mull over their experience, while magnificent archive footage brings to life the sheer inventiveness and political reach of “Tropicalism”.
This carefully researched film investigates the cultural movement which began in Brazil in the late 1960s as a reaction to the popular music and nationalism of the period. Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé (and others) mull over their experience, emphasizing the valuable results achieved and the depth of the ideas debated, aesthetic, political and cultural.
Delving into a multicultural phenomenon, which blended the traditional songs of the Nordeste with American psychedelic rock, and bore fruit in theatre and cinema as well as in music, this documentary eschews commentary but draws widely on contemporary (and later) accounts. Drawing on some extraordinary archive footage, Tropicalia brings to life the sheer inventiveness and political reach of a movement which brought Brazil to the attention of the world at a time when the country was enduring a dictatorship which is still little known.
Carlo Chatrian
Translation BMP Translations