- Roberto Santos
Roberto Santos Pinhanez (1928–1987) was a
Brazil ian film director, known for films like "Matraga" ("A Hora e Vez de Augusto Matraga") and "The Great Moment" ("O Grande Momento").Biography
Roberto Santos was born in a working-class suburb of
Sao Paulo in 1928. He started his cinema activities around 1952, in the first big studio built in Brazil, the Vera Cruz Studio. In 1956, Santos made his first movie, "O Grande Momento" ("The Great Moment"), the first neo-realistic movie made in Brazil. In 1965, Roberto Santos adapted a short novel by Guimaraes Rosa, "A Hora e Vez de Augusto Matraga" ("Matraga"), the only successful adaptation to cinema of a work by Guimaraes Rosa, the most important name in Brazilian literature in this century. The movie was shown at theCannes Film Festival and it was well received.During the late 1960s and 1970s, his career was marked by problems with
censorship . Nevertheless, he directed six more movies, among them, two experimental movies; "Vozes do Medo" ("Voices of Fear") — a movie with the structure of a magazine — and "As Tres Mortes de Solano" ("The Three Deaths of Solano"), an experiment where the same plot is told three times, first in the fantastic realm, then as a realistic plot, and finally as a circuspantomime . Meanwhile, he worked in television and directed commercials. The success of an adaptation for TV of another Guimaraes Rosa's story prompted him to write a screenplay for the short novel "Campo Geral", about a kid growing in the back-country of Brazil. After months of trouble to obtain the rights, the project was abandoned, and he decided to tackle another myth of Brazilian literature, "Machado de Assis".His last movie, "Quincas Borba", recreated Machado de Assis's "fin-de-siecle" universe in the troubled 1980s. Roberto Santos died of a
heart attack at the São Paulo airport in 1987, just after returning from the Festival of Gramado, where "Quincas Borba" was shown and heavily criticized by a clique of critics.Filmography
*"Quincas Borba" (1987)
*"Nasce Uma Mulher" (1983)
*"Os Amantes da Chuva" (1979)
*"As Três Mortes de Solano" (1978)
*"Contos Eróticos" (1977) (segment "Arroz com Feijão")
**aka "Erotic Stories" (International: English title)
*"Vozes do Medo" (1972)
*"Um Anjo Mau" (1971)
**aka "The Evil Angel"
*"O Homem Nu" (1968)
**aka "The Naked Man"
*"As Cariocas" (1966)
*"A Hora e a Vez de Augusto Matraga" (1965)
**aka "Matraga"
**aka "The Hour and Turn of Augusto Matraga" (USA)
*"O Grande Momento" (1958)
**aka "The Grand Moment" (International: English title)External links
*imdb name | id=0764252 | name=Roberto Santos
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