Missivas

This documentary film explores the world of the bow and the extraordinary masters who make them. The bow is the Cinderella of the orchestra—the overworked and overshadowed ally to its more glamorous partners. Few people, even among lovers of classical music, think of the bow as an instrument in its own right, but players of stringed instruments see them differently. To musicians, the bow is as essential to expressing the soul of the music as the violin or cello. The film follows the journey of the “silent servant” of the music world—from the workshops of the virtuosos of the trade, to the birthplace of the bow in France, and to Brazil, home to the imperiled tree from which the world’s finest bows are made.

The Amazon is the river of superlatives: the longest - 7,025 km, the most powerful, the most indomitable - no dam possible over hundreds of kilometres. Its waters cross the largest tropical forest in the world: the Amazon, “the lungs of the earth”. Going against the current of this gigantism, this documentary is betting on approaching this extraordinary natural space through one of its tiniest productions: the cocoa bean. Scientists, chocolate makers, producers and farmers, many are those who, faced with the deforestation of this unique ecosystem, use this chocolate seed to recreate, on a small scale, human exploitations in harmony with nature. This film tells us about the fight of those who decided to make cocoa the spearhead of environmental defense in Brazil.

Lissette's favorite aunt Adriana, who lives in Australia, is arrested in 2007 while visiting her family in Chile and accused of having worked for dictator Pinochet's notorious secret police, the DINA, and of having participated in the commission of state crimes. When Adriana denies these accusations, Lissette begins to investigate her story in order to film a documentary about her.

An account of the childhood and youth of the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, and how the hard experiences he lived during these formative years led him to write and publish his first major work when he was only 26 years old.

Amid the civil-military dictatorship implanted with the 1964 coup, Sergio Muniz had the idea of making a documentary about the action of the Death Squad. At the time, the press still had some freedom to disseminate the work of these death squads formed by police officers of various ranks, and that he acted on the outskirts of cities like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The victims of police repression (as today) were men, poor and black, and this condition is supposed criminals.

Brazil's "Red Command" drug cartel is considered a plague by the government. But for the people of the favelas they control, Red Command *is* the government. They’re the de facto leadership of the area. The gang has taken over the role of the authorities in their shanty towns, where the state has long abandoned them. Away Days got special access to the Rio favelas, hanging out out with young foot-soldiers, speaking to commanders, and seeing how civilians live between the gangs and the equally violent police militias.

An exploration of potential extraterrestrial encounters, centered on a series of events in 1996 when citizens of Varginha, Brazil, reported seeing one or more strange creatures and a UFO crash.

A journey into the interior of garbage, contemplated as a phenomenon of the human spirit, and not only as a product of human action. This essay-documentary, inspired by modern chaos theory, transits between the reality of statements and the surrealism of poetic images, seeking to integrate the conscious and unconscious life of the human mind. Apparently simple phenomena hide very complex behaviors. Maybe garbage is all that we don't want to see

Questions about celebrating 200 years of independence from Brazil with 300 years of slavery.

A documentary on the war between the Guatemalan military and the Mayan population, with first hand accounts by Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú.