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Known For

Eduardo Coutinho is known for:

  • Playing
    Following a newspaper ad, ordinary women tell part of their life stories to director Eduardo Coutinho, which are then re-enacted by actresses, blurring the barriers between truth, fiction and interpretation.
  • Master, a Building in Copacabana
    "Master" is the name of a 12-story apartment building in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro's neighborhood for nightlife. Over the course of four weeks in 2001, Eduardo Coutinho's film crew rented one of the 276 apartments and used it as home base to make a film about the building's residents. We get to know the building manager, who succeeded in turning the troubled residence into a family complex within just a few years. Using interviews and a few stolen moments in the corridors of the building, Coutinho explores this world. Most of the building's residents come from the lower middle class and are just getting by, but that's just about the only thing they have in common - so many people, so many stories, sometimes told in a self-confident tone, sometimes with averted eyes. The fact that a film crew is interested in their stories puzzles some of them. Hope, fear, dreams, memories, love and loneliness all appear from behind the doors of this average apartment building.
  • Twenty Years Later
    Eduardo Coutinho was filming a movie with the same name in the Northeast of Brazil, in 1964, when there came the military coup. He had to interrupt the project, and came back to it in 1981, looking for the same places and people, showing what had ocurred since then, and trying to gather a family whose patriarch, a political leader fighting for rights of country people, had been murdered.

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Biography

Eduardo Coutinho (1933-2014) enjoyed an extraordinary career in the Brazilian film industry, mainly as a documentarist. He was born in São Paulo, Brazil. He is a contemporary of many Cinema Novo filmmakers, friend and colleague of several of them, but he only became a director at the beginning of the 1980s, almost at the age of fifty, in a context entirely different from that of Brazil in the 1960s. He also studied law, theatre and journalism, in which he worked for many years. He is the author of articles on the Brazilian film industry published in newspapers and magazines. His first contact with the film world was at a seminar in 1954, but from then until 1957 he was the editor of Visão magazine and later decided to take up film studies at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies (IDHEC) in Paris. He worked on the script or in the production of major films directed by Leon Hirzsman (A Falecida, Garota de Ipanema), Eduardo Escorel (Lição de Amor), Bruno Barreto (Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands) and Zelito Viana (Os Condenados). In 1975, Coutinho joined the Globo Repórter team, where he remained for nine years, and, according to its director, it was an important learning curve that convinced him to move into documentary films. In spite of censorship, the team (made up of Paulo Gil Soares, João Batista de Andrade, Jorge Bodansky, and Oswaldo Caldeira, among others) managed to go in-depth into a number of topics. Coutinho’s documentaries from this period include Seis Dias em Ouricuri (on the drought and the hard labour in the outback), O Pistoleiro de Serra Talhada (on banditry in the north-east), O Imperador do Sertão (on Colonel Teodorico Bezerra) and O Menino de Brodósqui (on the painter, Cândido Portinari).