On August 22, Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha died at the early age of 42, a tragedy that deprives the film world of one of its great directors. A seminal figure in the development of Third World cinema, and the artist who introduced Cinema Novo to the outside world, Rocha was forced, after Antonio Das Mortes (1969), to work in Europe and Cuba when the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement was derailed by censorship and repression. He returned to Brazil shortly before his death. Rocha's most recently completed film, Age of the Earth, was presented at both the Edinburgh and Telluride Film Festivals this summer, and will have its West Coast premiere at the PFA in November. Glauber Rocha's films reflect, both in structure and in content, his Brazilian roots, weaving as they do the powerful traditions, mysticism, and primitivism of that country into a radical statement of concern for social and agrarian realities.
