Now, how do we approach a country that is so enormous and as diverse as Brazil?

How can Virtual Nomads pay homage to the different climates, cultures, demographics and complex history of Brazil? What a task. We know we will fail to portray the full picture of Brazil’s cultural richness, diversity and varying geographical landscapes. First of all, Brazil has 26 states that are bigger than most countries – all of which are very unique and distinguishable from one another. But for a single night we will pretend Brazil can be experienced through an evening of delicious food. And music – that amazing gift of music that Brazil has given to the world. 

I want to apologise to our Brazilian friends for simplifying the Brazilian stop by only shortly skimming over an overview not intending to cover Brazil in its entirety. Hopefully our brief adventure pays homage to the exciting, diverse force of nature that is Brazil. 

A rainy Brazilian night in Maroubra 

There are several Brazilian restaurants in Sydney in almost any price-range. We decide to ditch the high-price venues advertising fancy churrascos and rather head to a family-owned small restaurant in Maroubra. Brothers Grill Brazilian Restaurant and Steak House advertises how it serves casual Brazilian food in a rustic environment, which is exactly what we get. The Brazilian night gathers almost all core Nomads – 14 of us – for a night of quite delicious Brazilian food with great service. We share big plates of different meats and vegetables.

Brazil in a nutshell

Brazil is huge. As the 5^th largest country in the world with an estimated population of 205 million, it is so large that it is considered a ‘megadiverse’ country due to the diversity of climates, landscapes, flora and fauna – but also people and cultural influences. It includes the largest part of the mighty Amazon, yet also a long coastline. It offers enormous cultural and ethnic richness, however has also been historically plagued by high crime rates, corruption and one of the world’s most pronounced levels of wealth inequality.

Brazil is so large that it did not exist as a country or a unified region before the arrival of the Portuguese in 1500. Brazil’s name is said to derive from the Portuguese word pau-brazil, meaning a red tree that was growing on the coast. The Portuguese set up large sugar plantations demanding slave labour, leading to an active slave trade from Africa. (Brazil was the last country of the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, in 1888).

Brazilian independence was declared in 1822 by Pedro I (part of the Portuguese royal family), who appointed himself Emperor. He was followed by Pedro II who spoke 14 languages and modernised Brazil, attracting large numbers of immigrants. Pedro II was overthrown and exiled to Europe. Several dictatorships followed. Getúlio Vargas did not like the fact that he lost a presidential election, so he forcibly took power in 1930. He later established the Estado Novo (New State) in 1937, marked by censorship and government brutality. His position weakened in 1945, however  he returned shortly to power in 1950 ( afterwards suffering a sad end in 1954). Some other presidents followed, but from 1964 to 1985, as did some of its neighbours, Brazil lived through an authoritarian military dictatorship, which was, of course, not great for the common people. The return of democracy catalysed some more and some less successful political leaders, as well as prolonged crises of corruption, police brutality and abuse of power of the political establishment. Currently, Brazil’s president is Lula da Silva, following Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2023), a very controversial president. Lula da Silva was also president from 2003 to 2011, then followed by Dilma Rousseff. Anyone interested in learning more about her impeachment is encouraged to watch Petra Costa’s superb 2019 documentary ‘The Edge of Democracy’.

Later, when we study Brazil at home with A (10), we learn many things: 

• Brazil has won the football world cup five times –  the highest of any country. We research the recently deceased football legend, Pelé (who died in December 2022), hailed as the greatest football player of all time. Pelé’s incredible posthumous impact is such that four months after his death, and after a petition that gathered 125,000 signatories, the Michaelis Portuguese-language dictionary included the word pelé as a synonym for “unique, exceptional, incomparable”. 

“Pelé” — um adjetivo que pode ser masculino ou feminino — é descrita pelo dicionário como “que ou aquele que é fora do comum, que ou quem em virtude de sua qualidade, valor ou superioridade não pode ser igualado a nada ou a ninguém” 

· You cannot talk about Brazil without mentioning music and the Carnival –  the biggest, brightest and most colourful carnival in the universe!

· 60% of the Amazon is in Brazil. The Amazon river is the second longest river in the world, and the rainforest  is the world’s largest – home to more than 30 million people.

Four books from Brazil (or rather five but we do not count one)

The best-selling author from Brazil is Paolo Coelho. He has sold over 300 million books globally and is considered to be one of the most influential authors in the world. His books have been described as part magical realism, part New Age, often focusing on spirituality and finding one’s life purpose. I have read some of his books in the past, so I will not for my Virtual Nomad booklog. Paolo’s most famous book is The Alchemist. While I am fully aware that it has been an important book for many, it has not been influential nor significant for me. None of the core Virtual Nomads are into Coelho’s spiritual philosophy, but we know people to whom his literature and teachings has been life-changing, so it is not our place to express judgement on the value of his teachings.

Therefore, my first Brazilian book for the Virtual Nomad stop is O Quarto de Despejo by Carolina Maria de Jesus, translated as Child of the Dark in English. I decide to read it in the original language. Carolina was a poor black woman living in one of the favelas of São Paolo, Canindé. Born in the state of Minas Gerais, she moved to São Paolo with her mother with the intention of finding a better life (the fate of her mother is not known).  Because she could read and write (not common in a favela), she started to write a diary about her life in the favela. The book was published in 1960 and is based on the actual diary of Carolina. It became an overnight sensation and a best seller. It is a rare piece of documentary literature that portrays the life of the urban poor in the 1950s/1960s in Brazil. More than sixty years after it was published (and nearly fifty years after the once-celebrated Carolina died of lung disease, forgotten and poor) it remains current for its portrayal of ever-present hunger (practically starvation), discrimination, poverty, violence, misery and devastating inequality. At the beginning of the book she says: “Life is like a book. Only at the end of it you will know its full content.”

Foto: Revista Periferias 

The language is simple and practical. Carolina only had a few years of schooling so the writing is quite straightforward, but it is a remarkably effective portrayal of life in the favela. The life she describes is full of ever-present hunger and crippling poverty. She collects paper during the night to sell and feed her three children. Her relations with her neighbours are poor. She describes how it feels to hear the baker call for everyone to buy sweet bread in the morning “because it is time for breakfast”, when most people in the favelas cannot afford breakfast. She describes the smell of the favelas – a mix of excrement and rotten clay. People try to find shoes in the garbage, that then only last for a few days as they are already rotting. She conveys what it feels like when your child vomits worms and you have no food or clothes, freezing during cold days. She is an observer of the people around her –she is not always nice,sometimes writing with a sense of superiority. She has been described as having a fiercely independent and aggressive spirit that would bring her problems, basically because she was not a grateful and ‘good’ poor for the ruling class. But she is a survivor –  a person with flaws fighting for survival in inhuman conditions, just like everyone else around her. Sometimes she portrays suicidal ideation and often curses her faith and her life. The novel describes the fights, the relationships, the conflicts, the hunger, the poverty, and the children that die in the favela. It is quite an amazing book to read as it is very grounded and real. Carolina’s notoriety lasted a very short time – even though she was able to leave the favela, the limelight faded quickly and she was forced to return to the favela, where she would die. 

“A child died here in the favela. He was two months old. If he had lived, he would have starved.”(7 October 1958) 

A full story of Carolina’s life by Robert M. Levine (1992) can be read here: https://kellogg.nd.edu/sites/default/files/old_files/documents/178_0.pdf 

It  gives a full picture of how she was treated after her diary was published –  like a “curious animal”, the document says. It is almost as devastating a read as the diary itself. 

I turn to my Brazilian friends for recommendations for my next book but no one wants to take responsibility for putting forward a book or two, over others, to represent Brazil. Brazil is huge with an incredibly rich literary tradition. Should I choose the author who is considered the greatest Brazilian writer, Machado de Assis, who I have never read before, or other big names like Jorge Amado (who I have), Clarice Lispector (who I have) or Guimarães Rosa (who I have not)? Or exciting contemporary writers such as Adriana Lisboa?

What should I do? Put names in a hat? 

Ok then. I do just that.

My second Brazilian book is Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis, which is described as one of if not the greatest book in all Brazilian literature, and one of the greatest books ever written in the Portuguese language. Machado de Assis himself was a mestizo, an exceptional literary talent whose skill pushed through the barriers of his time and the most important writer of Brazilian realism. The novel could be described as a fictional memoir of an old, paranoid man consumed by jealousy when he starts to trust an idea built in his head: that his wife cheated on him and their only child is not his. It would be a major spoiler to say whether she did or not, but in the end it is a minor thing. The story is more about the main character, Bentinho Santiago, and his short spurts of thoughts; stream-of-consciousness reflections on his childhood, relationship with his mother, best friend, wife. The writing flows with ease and (black) humour, and it must have been quite ahead of its time at its 1899 publication. While the writing is delicious, the story itself is less compelling for me. I do understand the narrative’s inherent value, and the writing keeps me engaged in most sections, but I grow a bit tired of the story itself, particularly withBentinho’s eccentricities. 

Torto Arado (translated to Crooked Plow in English) by Itamar Vieira Junior has won all the possible literature awards since its publication in 2018. Itamar himself was born in Salvador de Bahia, and has a PhD in African and Ethnic Studies. His doctoral thesis was about quilombos, communities originating from escaped slaves of African origin. The book is indeed magnificent, sublime, and definitely worth the hype. It is captivating and magical with a reader-trapping story that does not let go. I relish every moment. The central storyline follows two close sisters, descendants of slaves in North Eastern Brazil, still living in near-slavery conditions with very little. It is their story, but also the story of family, ancestors, generations of slaves, and the spirits, beliefs and tensions between the underprivileged and the privileged; the change and the stagnant, the silenced and the  quietly conformed, and the spaces between spiritual continuity and oblivion.  Without doubt, the story criticises and unpicks the unfathomable cruelty of slavery and the capability of humans to treat fellow humans with such disdain. It is a remarkable book that trusts the reader to see things beyond the words on the page to anticipate what will happen – building trust on the reader’s critical ability to understand the small and big nuances evoked. It achieves a fascinating balance between the magical and political realm. It is heartbreaking and satisfying, magical and real, and about rights and wrong in a mesmerising, raw, graphic and poetic way. 5/5.

My final Brazilian book is by another contemporary writer Adriana Lisboa, said to be one of the leading contemporary authors in Latin America. I decide to read her book Crow Blue –  a combination, I discover, of both a coming-of-age tale and a sociocultural-focused narrative of understanding one’s place in the world through one’s roots. It is an interesting book, but there always lies danger when a grownup writes in a teenager’s voice, which is precisely what happens with this book. The protagonist is a 13-year girl who loses her mother and is whisked away to live in the US with her stepfather – who happened to be a guerrilla during the dictatorship in Brazil. It does not make complete sense that she would go to live with him in the US but hey, stranger things have happened. It effectively describes the experience of an immigrant and the sense of being trapped between two worlds; this is the sphere in which the book reads the most smoothly. The story is fed from Adriana’s own experience living as an immigrant in Colorado (albeit in much more privileged circumstances than the characters in the book, which often creates a slight sense of artificiality). For me, the sentiment of the book functions better than the narrative – there are excellent moments to the story, however there are also  sections that do not carry across so well. A bit like life itself.

Brazilian film – A festival

The Brazilian movie industry is vivid and powerful, with a plethora of quality movies. I have seen a lot of Brazilian cinema so it is easy for me to pick what I think is the crème of the abundant cinematic-crop, but I also want to see something new and include a variety of cinematographic pearls. Just to get it right, I turn to my Brazilian friend LB who is a documentary film maker and seek his approval of my proposed list. 

It was supposed to be ten – but the final selection for our Brazilian film festival consists of eleven movies; some which I have seen and some that I have not. Out of the eleven movies, A (10) is only allowed to see one which is a devastating film enough for him ( below; the 7^th film of our Brazilian Film Festival). 

It is an incredibly exciting list of movies, and we start with my very favourite.

City of God is one of the most infamous Brazilian movies. According to the list of the Top100 Brazilian movies of the Brazilian Film Critics Association (Abraccine, 2016), City of God is 8^th, and the only movie filmed in the new millennium within the top 14. It is co-directed by Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund. I have a friend, MB, who works for Cinema Nosso, the NGO linked to the movie (founded by the directors and some of the actors in the movie). Apart from being famous for the movie, Cinema Nosso does amazing social work with young people in the favelas,offering lifestyle opportunities through workshops and film making. Their work can be observed and followed at https://cinemanosso.org.br/ 

After rewatching with my partner, JK, I determine the movie to be just as powerful as I remember. My  daughter L (17) and her boyfriend NA (soon to be 18 – oh gosh, L thinks as she proofreads her mother’s Brazil entry – she still needs to find him a gift), also watch the film, and find it truly evocative and thrilling. It is still a modern masterpiece with several interlinking layers. It is difficult to talk about all the interconnections and symbolism embedded in the narrative, alongside the impeccable storytelling, without spoiling it but everything makes sense and every detail is important. Essentially, the storyline follows boys and young men growing up around the world of crime and corruption in the Rio de Janeiro favela called Cidade de Deus (City of God). Only one of the actors (playing ‘Carrot’) is professional and the rest of the cast are people from the favelas. It is multilayered, impressive, compelling, crude and incredibly effective. L says the movie  is  impressive, heartbreaking and just brilliant: one of the movies which you cannot really articulate why they are so effective, they just are. In particular, L and NA fawn over the use of the creative use and manipulation of time throughout the narrative, such as instances of zooming up on a person, promptly followed by the narrator telling the audience ‘But it’s not time to tell [the character]’s story yet’.

Next on the list is Central Station (which is 11^th on Abraccine’s list), another of my Brazilian favourites. Central station is a road movie, with a stellar performance by Fernanda Montenegro. Compelling and emotional yet never overly sentimental, the film is a melancholic yet beautiful story about a young boy and an older woman forced to take care of him. It is a tale about human connection and family, and above all, the human heart. Directed by Walter Salles, it is a melancholic yet optimistic road movie of the warmth of the human heart.

JK and I proceed to watch Elite Squad (2007 – 30^th on the Abraccine list) – a critical and commercial success in Brazil, and one of the most watched movies in Brazilian history. This is a movie I have not seen before, so I am very intrigued. On the forefront, the movie tells about institutional (and individual) corruption and power. As we have seen the systematic corruption and inefficiency of the United Nations Peace Keepers in previous Virtual Nomad entries, this one follows police corruption – but also discusses more, less apparently, in order to make things not so black and white. The Rio de Janeiro favelas are so dangerous that for police forces to enter their areas, they forge agreements with the favela gangs. The elite squad BOPE, whose recruitment practices are beyond brutal and extremely humiliating, with the objective of making their ‘elite’ soldiers killing machines, is the only police force that the favela criminals are afraid of. If a favela gang member kills a BOPE member, he knows his days are numbered, because BOPE holds nothing back. 

Some criticism received is how the film apparently glorifies police brutality, but my understanding is different; I feel it does quite the opposite. While it illuminates widespread institutional police corruption (which is, without a doubt, very real), the film shows how even the ‘honest’ ones are slowly stripped of their humanity while hunting for ‘thugs’ in what they considered to be urban warfare. It is an impactful movie that, beyond its brutality and quite shocking illustrations of extreme violence (on both sides), tells of a story of lawless territory where underpaid police and gang-joining, poverty-stricken young men in favelas engage in an urban tale of survival– all born from a much larger context of desperation, poverty, corruption and violence. 

The Second Mother (2015, 71st on the Abraccine list) is a movie by Anna Muylaert, the title translated to “What time she’ll be back?” in the original language. It is a movie about Val, a live-in maid of an affluent family who has left her own daughter behind in the state of Pernambuco so that she can provide her a better life. The distance has grown very big between the two, and Val is closer to the only son of the family she serves. When her daughter suddenly contacts Val,  asking to stay with her while she takes her university entrance test, tensions in  class differences begin to become more apparent. The setting is similar to the movie I watched for the Bolivia entry (Zona Sur), and reminds of the highly awarded Mexican movie from Alfonso Cuarón, Roma. The children become closest to those who love and care for them while the adults treat the servants almost like  property or as beloved pets that should always know their place. The movie is based on the director’s own experience with a nanny who left her child while caring for Anna’s child. While a bit uneven, it remains an intriguing movie with a satisfactory and uplifting, but overly ideal solution. The main actress, Regina Cáse, does an incredible job in her role as Val, a self-sacrificing and maternal middle-aged woman, who accepts her place in society as given and unchangeable. 

Carandiru (2003, 95^th on the Abraccine list) is a movie by Héctor Babenco about the massacre of the Carandiru Penitentiary in 1992. The Carandiru prison is famous for the death of 111 prisoners by police forces after a rebellion escalated and became unmanageable. The film is based on the book by Antônio Drauzio Varella, the author being a doctor who volunteered in Carandiru to test prisoners for AIDS. The movie, shot on location with real prisoners serving as supporting actors, intends to bring a human side to the inhuman conditions the prisoners were living in. The massacre itself is a minor part of the movie, and more emphasis is given to individual stories, community and the microcosmos the prisoners created. It is a long movie which works both in favour of (you get to know the characters well) and against (there are almost too many storylines) the narrative. The movie is to be commended for its description of the lives of the prisoners – some career criminals and some victims of circumstances – and some casualties of the biggest prison massacre in Brazil that sent shock waves around the world. Nevertheless, kudos to the movie itself for not making the details of the massacre the  centerpiece of the movie, rather presenting the prisoners as people first. 

High up (4^th) on Abraccine (2016) is a documentary, Cabra Marcado para Morrer, from 1984 (named in English as Twenty Years Later – the direct translation would have been Goat marked to die). The documentary intended to describe the life and death of João Pedro Teixeira, a peasant leader in the state of Paraíbo, who was killed by local landowners in 1962. The making of the documentary is a fascinating story. Starting filming in 1964, the director Eduardo Coutinho cast João’s widow and local farmers to play themselves, but filming was stalled by representatives of the Brazilian military dictatorship. Eduardo returned twenty years later to film the rest and build the documentary, and it becomes a documentary about a documentary, and much more. Eduardo films those involved (who are still left) and builds a story about people who reflect on the impact of all that happened twenty years prior, up to their present (1984). It is an important documentary in Brazil, as a thought-provoking portrait of class conflict, the struggles of peasants in Brazil as well as a deeply effective narrative of the life of those involved. 

Isla das Flores – Isle of Flowers (1989, 13th on the Abraccine list) by Jorge Furtado is an award-winning and very highly acclaimed short film. It tracks the life cycle of a tomato from a supermarket to the landfill of Porto Alegre where rotten food is first given to pigs and then to the poor women and children who live in the area. This is the only movie from the list that A (10) is allowed to watch. It is rated for all ages so I watch it with A (10) and L (17). 12 minutes long, it is a shocking, partly funny yet quite moving watch. It is a clever documentary of the human condition and the monetary value of human life. When we research whether the conditions in the area have changed over thirty years later (2024), unfortunately we find several articles describing that the situation remains gravely similar. 

Probably the hardest watch on the whole list is Pixote (1981, 12^th on the Abraccine list), by Héctor Babenco, director of Carandiru. This movie is devastating, heartbreaking and very raw. At the beginning of the film, the director introduces the story with some statistics – 28 million children in Brazil live under the absolute poverty line – three million of them having no home nor family. The current statistics on street children in Brazil are unreliable, varying from 300,000 to seven million depending on sources and definitions of a homeless minor. There have been several policies and initiatives implemented to try to tackle the problem that derives from the core issues of poverty, violence, addiction and inequality. The movie is about all that and more – there is very little light in describing the cycle of abuse street minors face at the mercy of juvenile prison guards, gangs and pimps. It shows child prostitution, sexual abuse, violence, alienation, hunger, struggle, poverty, misery, betrayal. From the very first moments in a juvenile prison all the way to life on the streets, the film shows this self-same cycle of violence and despair.  It is a very hard watch. The acting is surprisingly good and many of the child actors (some as young as 10) came from harsh life situations themselves – the real life story of the main child actor, Fernando Ramos da Silva, is nearly as heartbreaking as the movie itself. He was shot dead by police at the age of 19. 

A very different movie on the list is Bacurau (2019). It is not placed on Abraccine  as it was made after the 2016 list. I find it through a recommendation by a Brazilian friend who says: “prepare yourself for a wild ride”. And wild it is. It stars the great Sônia Braga, who should of course be more famous for her excellent acting work rather than her romances with people such as Robert Redford and Caetano Veloso. It is difficult to place what genre the movie represents because it mixes western, sci fi, horror, thriller, etc – and is very violent. It is a wild ride, not particularly enjoyable, but certainly an interesting watch. Supposedly, the movie carries an anti-colonialist message that is at times buried under the graphic and prolonged violence, and  it won the Jury Prize of the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. It is not a film that I would re-watch; at times I struggled with the excessive, detailed violence that becomes the centrepiece of the movie. 

As mentioned before, the documentary by Petra Costa (a very interesting contemporary filmmaker – her movie Elena, about her dead sister, is also a superb documentary), The Edge of Democracy, is a surprisingly intimate portrait of Presidents Lula, Dilma Rousseff and Bolsonaro, and what led to the impeachment of Dilma. The director has hadunprecedented access to the political elite, and uses the documentary as a vehicle to understand the state  Brazil has found itself in. A Netflix production, the film is an excellent tool to understand what has happened in Brazil in recent years.

Bus 174. (67^th on the Abraccine list). The final movie for the Brazilian entry is a documentary that hits close to home – and for that reason I watch it with my partner JK. As Virtual Nomad is not about individual travels or experiences, I will not go into too much detail – only to say that this document is left last for a reason. This is the director of Elite Squad’s first film, following an attack on a Rio de Janeiro bus of route 174 (in 2000), and the subsequent hostage situation lasting hours. The documentary contains real footage of the situation and interviews with people that were on both sides of the events (people on the bus, police and media outside), but also dwells deeper into the story of the assailant, a street child with tragic past and his connection to the famous massacre of homeless children sleeping in front of a church in Candelária. 

Belo has a voice of velvet

The music from Brazil would deserve an entry of its own. Brazil is the paradise of bossa nova, samba, capoeira, axe, choro, etc.. It is the home of musical giants such as Caetano Veloso, João Gilberto, Vinicius de Morais, Gilberto Gil, Xeca Baleiro, Marisa Monte, Daniela Mercury, etc. It is the wonderland of rhythm and melody. I play my great favourites to the kids, Belo Velloso and Seu Jorge. Seu Jorge is a musician and actor (he played Knock-out Ned in City of God) and Belo Velloso is the niece of Caetano Veloso. Their music is harmonic and warm, and the kids love it. Toda sexta feira is my favourite Belo Velloso song, beautiful and light, happy and warm. 

The images of the forgotten 

We finish the long, long Brazilian stop with the images of S. Salgado. Sebastião Salgado studied and worked in economics before picking up the camera. His photography often portrays and represents the life of the underprivileged, homeless and the forgotten. He has been called the superstar of modern photojournalism. .  Thousands of his photos can be found at: https://www.artnet.com/artists/sebasti%C3%A3o-salgado/ 

Next stop: Brunei Darussalam

Thank you L for all your work with proofreading