Ask a Brazilian skeptic

[Rev. Rye]

I don't know shit about it. I know some stuff about Rio, mostly what I've seen in films

If you want to watch some movies that aren't set in Rio de Janeiro, look up São Paulo, Sociedade Anônima, The Man Who Copied and The Year My Parents Went on Vacation.  For one set in Rio that isn't about their favelas, see Wolf at the Door.

And Year My Parents Went on Vacation is the only one I have at my local library. The first two don't even seem to have been given any meaningful level of US exposure, and Wolf at the Door was shockingly hard to find info on because it was overshadowed by a crappy Mansonsploitation film from America. I suppose it's kind of inevitable; the films that get picked up by American distributors tend to be the ones that fit the sort of view Americans have of them already.

It's a phoenomenon that's hindered my enjoyment of modern German cinema because the only German films that get play in these parts are those dealing largely with the authoritarian legacy that's hindered them until 1945 (1989 for the East.) Films set in the more comfortable modern era, like Knockin on Heaven's Door, which seems to be an amazing comedy, may be given a brief theatrical release, but no DVD or even a VHS release.

For what it's worth, I have a copy of Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, one of the most famous books from Brazil hereabouts, coming in the mail (any day now), but given the "factless autobiography" nature of it, I'm not sure I'll learn a lot from that.

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I'm Brazilian too! (From Rio)

Moved to the United States when I was 7 years old.

So, with my learning about the origins of J a c k, now we have two semi-secret lovely Latinas on the forum? Or were your parents just white folks who happened to live in Brazil for a time and then left? Given the nature of the different colonization of Brazil and the rest of Latin America, do Brazilians even count as Latin? From what I've learned about the complicated nature of race in Brazil, can Anglo ideas of race even apply to Brazil and hope to make sense?