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Latin America is riding a cinematic high, what with the Mexican triumvirate, Del Toro, Innarittu, Cuaron capturing the imagination of the world, helping each other, working on one another’s films , producing for the other etc while Argentina continues its saga of dancing the pictoral Tango but what is really worth looking into is the Brazilian resurgence.

We have seen Walter Salles’s Motorcycle Diaries,Fernando Meirelles’s City of God,Hector Babenco’s Carandiru and now we see Andrucha Waddington’s THE HOUSE OF SAND, he is also connected in that strange triangular way to SALLES and BABENCO,having assisted them.

CASA DE AREIA won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.

Andrucha Waddington started out serving coffee for Brazilian auteur Carlos Diegues (”Orfeu”). He soon graduated to work on films with Walter Salles and Hector Babenco, moved up the ladder to assistant directing, and by his early 20s, began directing commercials, music videos and documentaries. In 1995, Waddington started pre-production on “Me You Them, which picked up major awards from Karlovy Vary to Cannes .
Waddington has made more than 200 commercials for TV. He is also one of the most awarded directors of video clips in Brazil.

Andrew O’Hehir in Salon: “The House of Sand is without doubt the most prestigious production to emerge so far from Brazil’s booming film industry, and I have to say I have mixed feelings about it…. Think Antonioni and Kurosawa, with liberal dashes of The Piano and Woman in the Dunes. Hell, there are worse things.”

indieWIRE: So what is your feeling about Brazilian film right now?
Andrucha Waddington:
“We’re back again. We had a great time from the 60s to the 80s and then it started to go down. The theaters started to close. The financial systems were destroyed. So in 5 years, from ‘90 to ‘95, we had four films. And then it started to go up in 1995, when the government made a law that there’s a tax reduction when you invest in cinema. It started to build up again. Now, we’re making around 35 movies per year. Walter Salles made a big hit with “Central Station,” it was really nice for the Brazilian film industry, because we understood that we could have a place internationally. When you make a film for your own country, a small story, well-told, it can travel a lot, because it’s sincere.

Now, there is a very interesting moment in Brazil. Because you have this new generation with Walter and me. He is very important for our generation, because he started something that now all of us are doing together. So it’s a nice time, because we’re all making films. We have this company called Conspiracy Films; we are eight directors, six producers and one investment banker. It’s like a cooperative. It’s a place where we can develop our projects, and we focus on one project at a time. I think that’s the best way to help each other. We’re planning to make two films a year”.

These links provide a better insight into the man and the director [and Ladies, Happy Women's Day!!- he is very handsome], his influences and his works. If they were not so long,I would have had them in their entirety here as they are a wonderful read.

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Just as Guisseppe Tornatore’s Malena is forced into a situation not of her making and has to abide by whatever she is offered in life, here too Fernanda Torres’s character Aurea struggles to escape her lot only to be time and again pulled back into the abyss,but is this the black hell-hole of civilzation that she assumes this to be or is this the real ‘free world’ ?

Visually capturing the oppressively vast landscape,where these women have to cope with nature and circumstances not of their doing,while
telling a very sparse tale with poignancy and empathy,has produced a multi-layered work that is ultimately more probing than what meets the eye.

Andrucha Waddington’s imagery to portend time’s passing through centuries and wars is as good as having dates stamped all over the screen,it is that lucid.

Some critics [ www.rottentomatoes.com ] though have termed it a pretentious project,reeking in vanity,having a slow moving plot…………..

Spanning a period of fifty nine years, the film which is a little under two hours was shot at the Lençóis Maranhenses National Park,in northern Brazil with white dunes and lagoons and nothing much else. The mother and daughter duo in real life played mother and daughter in reel life,while the husband and son-in-law Waddington directs wife Fernanda Torres and mother-in-law Montenegro respectively. [ I wonder how that went ]

Torres essays two roles of Aurea and Maria while Montenegro essays three,Dona,Aurea,Maria.It is all very confusing till you figure out who is who,then,it gets really thrilling.Montenegro the mother here has previously also played the mother in Walter Salles’s “Central Station”.

Urging readers NOT TO CONFUSE this film with “THE HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG” which starred Ben Kinglsey and was based on Andre Dubus’s
book of same name. [ 2003 ]

An aside on Waddington’s Production House: Conspiracao Filmes, which is called Conspiracy Films in general the biggest in Brazil at the moment.

” How did Sony Classics get involved?”

Michael Barker [ of Sony Classics ]: What I have found in Brazil is everyone is related to everyone. When we did “Central Station,” Fernando Montenegro introduced me to Andrucha. It’s all family, like the Barreto family. It’s really true. Once you’re there, it’s like you’re all part of this cinema of families. It’s great. So when I was in Brazil with Sundance, I met with Leo and Andrucha. And Andrucha called and said, come and meet the people in my company. And I was so impressed with the company. You know what it reminded me of? In each country, there’s a company like this, like Good Machine in the U.S., like X-Filme in Germany that Tom Tykwer is a part of, and here is this new company run by some young filmmakers and some who are not filmmakers, that have a fresh look and fresh pictures. And so we met in their conference room and they showed me some footage of his earlier films and then we talked about his picture. And when the picture was in post-production, they showed us the film and right after the screening, we bought it in 5 minutes. Should I say that, Leo? We did.

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