Cinemateca Brasileira

The News

By Ray Pride

September 27, 2020

Nick Pinkerton: “After years of struggling to staunch the bleeding of successive budget cuts, the Cinemateca Brasileira was faced with a decisive crisis following the election of Brazil’s current president, Jair Bolsonaro. Former president Dilma Rousseff had drained the resources of the nonprofit in charge of the Cinemateca, in 2013 and the institution was subsequently run by a private foundation, Associação de Comunicação Educativa Roquette Pinto (ACERP). In September, 2019, several contractually protected Cinemateca employees were shifted to federal positions, while “the press publicized that the new administration was using the Cinemateca Brasileira to hand out jobs to political allies and propagate the government’s extreme-right ideology, with initiatives such as a program of military films.” In December, the government revoked the contract with ACERP, and made no further provisions for the Cinemateca’s funding; by May of the following year, the reduced staff were no longer being paid, nor was the electricity bill. Tensions rose through the summer between ACERP, the striking Cinemateca workers, and the Bolsonaro government, which has made erratic and legally dubious gestures towards running the Cinemateca itself, while seeming only too happy to see the institution starved of resources and its collections endangered until a regime change is sorted out. (At the same time, the federal government has been threatening the Cinemateca Capitólio in Porto Alegre with privatization.) On August 12, the forty-one employees of Cinemateca Brasileira were dismissed, with no plans for a transfer of institutional knowledge between administrations, no new administration announced, and not a single member of technical staff remaining to mind the collection in the interim.”

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