Filmmaker Gabriel Mascaro brings Brazilian winds to the Wex

Gabriel Mascaro and curator Chris Stults pose with a Carnaval puppet in Olinda, Brazil. 

It was no surprise for the Wexner Center’s film/video department when IndieWire proclaimed Neon Bull, the new movie by the Brazilian filmmaker Gabriel Mascaro, the “great discovery” of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. We’ve been showing Mascaro’s films for years, have known him for even longer, and during a residency in our Film/Video Studio Program last May, we got to see a nearly finished version of the film—even guiding Gabriel to its English language title. In fact, over the years he’s become part of the Wexner Center family. These are just a few of the reasons we’re excited to bring him to Columbus for his first public appearance at the Wex and to continue our relationship with him. Mascaro’s Wex visit is also one of only two stops he’s making while he’s in the US.

First, a little background on Neon Bull. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize, and went on to receive numerous awards and rave reviews at other festivals, in the process becoming the most acclaimed Brazilian film since Kleber Mendonça Filho’s landmark Neighboring Sounds. Neon Bull recently screened in New York as part of the prestigious MoMA/Film Society of Lincoln Center showcase New Directors/New Films, marking the arrival of this significant new voice in international cinema (Mascaro will also be the focus of a retrospective at Lincoln Center). Before that retrospective, however, Columbus audiences will have a chance to meet Mascaro and see his most recent films: the sultry August Winds and aforementioned Neon Bull, on March 31 and April 1 respectively. Come April, Neon Bull will be the first film of Mascaro’s to get a US theatrical release.

Reviews of August Winds and Neon Bull spend a lot of time talking about their rare and frank focus on sensuality, and not just in terms of sexuality, but also the erotics of everyday life. Both are set in the rural northeast of Brazil (August Winds on the shore and Neon Bull in the desert) and capture how isolation and boredom foster a finely attuned sense of longing and desire. Mascaro’s narrative films are exemplary examples of how a person’s natural environment can reveal his or her character, as well as how a character study can reveal things about a landscape. Their level of sophistication and craft in terms of cinematography, sound, editing, and performance reinforces the fact that Mascaro was already an accomplished filmmaker even before he made these features that put him on the global map. Prior to these films, Mascaro had proven himself to be one of Brazil’s most exciting young documentarians, making films we were honored to share with Columbus audiences as part of Cruzamentos, an expansive exhibition and film series, with the film portion focusing on Brazil’s impressive but relatively unknown tradition in the documentary field. Mascaro was one of the highlights of the series with his films Housemaids (which became part of a large national debate in Brazil about granting more rights to domestic workers) and High-Rise (about the people who live in penthouse condos, emphasizing the wealth disparities that are one of Brazil’s most defining and troubling qualities). The director even Skyped with Columbus high school students for a lively screening of Housemaids. Organizing Cruzamentos required several research trips to Brazil, which always included a visit with Mascaro to check in on his latest projects.

Curator Jennifer Lange and Gabriel Mascaro after Mascaro received his residency award at Videobrasil

While it may be his first public appearance here, this isn’t Mascaro’s first visit to the Wexner Center. Last year he came to develop a project in the Film/Video Studio Program in partnership with Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil, a São Paulo–based, biannual festival of contemporary art with a focus on video. For many years, Videobrasil has emphasized the importance of residencies in the development of an artist’s career, and they’ve worked with residency programs all around the world, offering them as awards to artists in the festival. With our ongoing focus on artist residencies, it was natural for the Wexner Center to form a partnership with them, and so, in 2013, we traveled to São Paulo as Videobrasil’s very first residency partner based in the United States. Not long after arriving, we learned that Mascaro had won a residency award for Housemaids, and—in a serendipitous moment—announced to him and the Videobrasil audience that he had been selected to come to the Wexner Center to develop a new work in the Film/Video Studio.

Like many of the most interesting artists working in Brazil, Mascaro’s practice isn’t limited to film/video; he works adeptly and intuitively across mediums, including photography, installation, and video. During his first visit to Columbus in the spring 2015, Mascaro explored a number of different ideas in the studio and spent lots of time with us discussing Neon Bull, politics, the United States, Brazil…we even caught the Rolling Stones in concert in the Horseshoe! Since that visit, he’s honed his ideas and will be pursuing two projects. The first is a video that studies the rapturous phenomenon of rave gospel culture in Brazil. And the second is series of photographs of assembly-line workers in the Brazilian factory that mass-produces the famous Guy Fawkes mask (featured in the graphic novel and film V for Vendetta, and more recently used as a symbol of political resistance by the hacktivist group Anonymous). Ever-timely, especially considering the tumultuous state of Brazilian politics today, Mascaro’s new projects and his screenings are an exciting continuation of our relationship. Stay tuned for more updates on his residency projects.