Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 141: Thu May 21

The Margin (Candieas, 1967): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.15pm 

This film, which also screens on May 8th, is part of the Brazil on Film season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

BFI introduction:
Ozualdo Candeias was a truck driver who loved movies and decided to make his own. He did so in a very idiosyncratic style that didn’t care to conform to anyone’s idea of cinema. His first feature, The Margin, often suggests a São Paulo rereading of Mario Peixoto’s great avant-garde classic Limite (1931). It’s a sort of love story set among a group of desperate and abandoned characters. The movie takes place around the banks of the Tietê river, which stands as a promise and a limit for everyone’s lives. While Peixoto was in dialogue with the European modern art he knew well, Candeias draws heavily from the poverty around him. The movie has barely any dialogue, and the filmmaker finds a lot of beauty in the middle of the harshness. Brazil’s underdevelopment would remain Candeias’s great source of inspiration, and from The Margin onwards, no other filmmaker did more to give it representation.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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