Basic Sanitation

Based in Porto Alegre, filmmaker Jorge Furtado (b.1959) is a beloved figure in Brazil. His work displays amazing range, from coming-of-age stories to animated critiques of capitalism to playful historical recreation to bitter tales of racism in Brazil to shaggy dog stories to neo-noir. Even within a film, Furtado is able to cover a lot of ground, jumbling genres as joyfully as he mixes together characters from all parts of Porto Alegre’s eclectic citizenry. What ties it all together is Furtado’s unceasing interest in playing with the cinematic construction of time and narrative. He is a master at setting up expectations and then upending those expectations, or bypassing them entirely, in ways that are both witty and illuminating. One of his favored methods is the collage, betraying a syncretic impulse that ties him to other Brazilian exponents of the modern and the postmodern, from Carlos Drummond de Andrade to Tom Zé.

A first glance at Furtado’s work can miss the subtle ways in which his intellect is at work on screen, although his big-hearted sympathy for his characters is unmistakable. A knowledge of Furtado’s shorts goes a long way towards alerting an audience to his subversive intelligence, an intelligence not far removed from the subversions of such musical tropicalistas as Os Mutantes and Caetano Veloso. —Harvard Film Archive