Coincidentally, this Thursday’s two biggest previews (7/21) tell stories of ghost children, who want to help real children face evil kidnappers. But while one is terrifying, the other is a children’s comedy. “The Black Telephone” marks the return of director Scott Derrickson (from “The Entity” and “Deliver Us From Evil”) to supernatural terror after a detour from “Doctor Strange”. Already “Pluft – O Fantasminha” has one of the biggest national premieres of recent times, reaching 700 screens.
The restricted circuit receives two more national films, with emphasis on “The House of Antiquities”, screened at the world’s major international festivals, including Cannes, which awarded the main international title of the list: “Memory”, by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, winner of the jury of the French festival last year.
Although most Brazilian audiences will only have access to the two ghost films, the film program receives a total of nine releases. Check out the trailers and details of each of them below, including ones that are real ghost movies, only visible to viewers who are familiar with the mythological rooms that project art outside the malls.
| THE BLACK PHONE |
Director Scott Derrickson’s return to horror after directing “Doctor Strange” (2016) is one of the best recent films in the genre, with 86% approval on Rotten Tomatoes.
The plot is based on the eponymous short story by Joe Hill, son of Stephen King and author of the work that inspired the series “Locke & Key”. The story is part of the best seller “Ghosts of the 20th Century” and was adapted by Derrickson himself in collaboration with screenwriter Robert Cargill, with whom the director developed the franchise “The Entity”.
By the way, the main role is Ethan Hawke, who starred in the first “The Entity” (2012). He plays a serial killer who kidnaps children who, in a twisted reference to “It”, uses black balloons and clown disguises to commit his crimes.
But his plans fail when his latest target receives unexpected help to escape. Ghosts of past victims call the newly kidnapped boy on the black phone in the title, which is cordless and shouldn’t work, teaching him how to survive, while his best friend from school begins to have visions of him being imprisoned. Young Mason Thames (“For All Mankind”) and Madeleine McGraw (young Hope from “Ant-Man and the Wasp”) lead the cast of children.
| PLUFT – THE GHOST |
The new adaptation of Maria Clara Machado’s popular children’s comedy is the first Brazilian live-action children’s film produced for the show in 3D. The classic storyline shows how Pluft, a ghost child who is afraid of people, befriends Maribel, a girl who is afraid of ghosts, who has been kidnapped by the terrifying pirate Woodshanks. Since the only ones looking for Maribel are three clumsy sailors, Pluft finds himself forced to become the hero of the story.
The feature film directed by Rosane Svartman (“Taina, the origin”) comes 60 years after the first film adaptation of “Pluft”, with Tom Jobim and Dorival Caymmi.
The new version highlights the return to the screens of Arthur Aguiar, winner of the “BBB 22”. Filming took place well before the reality show, in 2020, and the role of the former “Rebel” is small, like one of the three sailors in search of the protagonist. In addition to him, the cast includes children Nicolas Cruz and Lola Belli (“Where is my heart”), Fabiula Nascimento (“Segundo Sol”), Juliano Cazarré (“Pantanal”), Lucas Salles (“Detetive Madeinusa”) and Hugo Germano (“Unroll”).
| ANCIENT HOUSE |
Screened at the Cannes and Toronto festivals and awarded in Stockholm and Chicago, João Paulo Miranda Maria’s first feature film portrays the life of a black worker in an imaginary city of Germanic colonization in southern Brazil. Born in the Brazilian hinterland, he feels lonely, ostracized by cultural and ethnic differences and invisible to his bosses. One day he discovers an abandoned house full of objects that remind him of his origins. He slowly settles into this house and more and more objects start to appear.
Played by veteran Antônio Pitanga (“Ganga Zumba”, “Rio Babilônia”, “Irmãos Freitas”), the drama tackles structural racism and was filmed in Treze Tílias, a Santa Catarina town that has given strong support to the president-elect in 2018.
| ME AND SHE |
The Brazilian drama features Andréa Beltrão as a rocker who wakes up after 20 years in a coma and discovers she has an adult daughter, raised by her ex-husband’s current wife. Awakening her impacts everyone in the family, who must absorb her return, as she learns to walk, talk and relate again, with the detail of remaining as maladjusted as she was two decades ago.
Presented at the Rio and Brasilia festivals last year under another title (“Antes Tarde”), the production is the second feature film directed by Gustavo Rosa de Moura (“A Canção da Volta”), who has already had one. a third (“Cora”) aired on the national festival circuit late last year.
| LAST CITY |
The independent production is a revenge drama starring Julio Adrião (“Nise: O Coração da Loucura”) and shot with art cinema traits – and with a beautiful photograph – by newcomer Victor Furtado (assistant to “O Clube dos Cannibals “).
Mounted on his horse and in the company of a hiker, Adrião’s character is laden with quixotic symbolism as he embarks on his journey to a large city in the Brazilian northeast (a futuristic fortress), aiming to confront the one who has taken his lands and ended up with his family. . The allegorical style also evokes the politicization of Cinema Novo and helps to underline a critique of the inequality and speculation that plague the country’s big cities.
| OTSOGA MAGAZINES |
The work of the Portuguese couple Miguel Gomes (“One Thousand and One Nights”) and Maureen Fazendeiro is a metalinguistic drama for cinephiles, a pandemic confinement film about a pandemic confinement film, which has the distinction of being edited backwards. The screening starts from the end and progresses towards its beginning, showing the backstage of a film production in the same circumstances as the real film, with a low budget and a heavy protocol against covid-19. The actors play the actors, the directors appear as (versions of) themselves and each scene is motivated by what comes after (i.e. before it). Confused? But clever, with characters appearing out of nowhere only to arrive later in the messy projection, creating a sense of chaos that reflects the very situation of the pandemic.
By the way, Otsoga is August spelled backwards.
The cinematic puzzle won Best Director at the Mar del Plata Film Festival and Best Foreign Film of the Year from the US Online Critics Association.
| HIS LOVES |
Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s first film premiered in Cannes, was awarded in Melbourne and achieved 91% acclaim on Rotten Tomatoes with a love triangle typical of French cinema, presented in an atypical way. Actress Anaïs Demoustier (“Alice and the Mayor”) plays Anaïs from the original title (“Les Amours d’Anaïs”), a bankrupt 30-year-old woman in a crisis of love, who one day meets a married man who falls immediately in love for her The detail is that the wife of the new lover is a famous writer (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, from “Loucas de Alegria”), of whom Anaïs is a declared fan and for which she is totally attracted, creating a marital mess .
| PARADISE – A NEW LIFE |
The Italian comedy explores the paranoia of a young man (Vincenzo Nemolato, from “Martin Eden”) sent to an isolated village in the Swiss Alps by the witness protection service, where he comes face to face with the mafia killer he denounced, who he was also transferred from the same program. Fearing for his life, he tries to disguise himself and learn ways to kill the killer before he is killed. But he proves to be more than an amateur, completely inept. Until the mistrust begins to crumble, while the loneliness and nostalgia for Sicily bring them closer. The unexpected friendship creates funny scenes, but it doesn’t take away the feeling of a potential threat.
| MEMORY |
Winner of the Palme d’Or in 2010 with “Uncle Boonmee, Who Can Reminisce His Past Lives”, Thai Apichatpong Weerasethakul was again consecrated at the Cannes Film Festival with this film, which last year won the Jury Prize. “Memory” also marks the director’s English and Spanish debut and was shot in Colombia.
The film follows Jessica, played by Tilda Swinton (“Doctor Strange”), who visits her sister in Bogotá. There, she faces bouts of insomnia and searches for the source of sounds that seem supernatural to her in the middle of the night. During the day she befriends an archaeologist, who studies human remains discovered inside a tunnel under construction, and a fish scale in a small town nearby. With them she shares memories and moments of lyricism characteristic of the director’s works, which portray the fine line between life and death – and cinema and dreams – without anyone else.
Source: Terra
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