Eduardo Coutinho

Eduardo Coutinho was a Brazilian film director and journalist, considered by many as the greatest documentarist in the history of Brazilian cinema. He directed and wrote the script for the 1967 popular Brazilian film, ABC do amor, near the beginning of his career. He was known for making films that focused on the stories of ordinary people. Coutinho was born in São Paulo in 1933 and studied law at the University of São Paulo, but did not finish his degree. He had his first contact with cinema in 1954, in a seminar organized by the Museum of Art of São Paulo. He also worked as a copy editor and proofreader at the magazine Visão from 1954 to 1957. After winning a prize in a TV contest by answering questions about Charlie Chaplin, Coutinho moved to Paris in 1957 to study film direction and editing at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques, where he made his first documentaries. He returned to Brazil in 1960 and joined the Popular Center of Culture of the National Union of Students, a leftist intellectual group that aimed to promote social and cultural awareness among the masses. He worked on the production and editing of the film Cinco Vezes Favela, a landmark of the Cinema Novo movement, which portrayed the lives of slum dwellers in Rio de Janeiro. He also started to work on his own project, Cabra Marcado para Morrer, a fiction film based on the life and death of João Pedro Teixeira, a peasant leader of the Peasant Leagues in Pernambuco. He intended to cast the real rural workers and Teixeira's widow, Elizabeth, as actors in the film. However, the production was interrupted by the 1964 military coup, which accused the filmmakers of being communists and arrested some of them. The film was shelved for almost 20 years. ² In 1966, Coutinho founded a film production company with Leon Hirszman and Marcos Faria. He wrote and directed ABC do Amor in 1967, O Homem Que Comprou o Mundo in 1968, and Faustão in 1971. He also worked as a screenwriter for films such as Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands in 1976. Between 1976 and 1984, he was part of the team of the TV program Globo Repórter, where he made several documentaries on various topics. ² In 1984, he resumed his project of Cabra Marcado para Morrer, but this time as a documentary, using the footage from the original film and interviewing the surviving members of the production and the Peasant Leagues. The film was released in 1985 and won several awards, both national and international, and established Coutinho as the most important documentarist in Brazil. ²³ He continued to make documentaries that explored the lives, memories, and opinions of ordinary people, often using long interviews and minimal intervention. Some of his most acclaimed works are Santo Forte (1999), Edifício Master (2002), Peões (2004), Jogo de Cena (2007), and As Canções (2011). He also taught film courses and gave lectures in various institutions. ² He died on February 2, 2014, in Rio de Janeiro, after being stabbed by his son, Daniel, who suffered from schizophrenia and was under a psychotic episode. His wife, Maria das Dores, was also wounded in the attack. Daniel was hospitalized and later transferred to a psychiatric clinic. ²