Brazilian cinema history up in smoke

Once again, Brazil has been struck by a cultural “tragedy foretold”: one of the archive warehouses of the Cinemateca Brasileira caught fire, apparently as a result of subcontracted services to repair the air-conditioning system. It’s still not known exactly what was lost, but the damage definitely includes equipment, films, documentation, and research. This loss comes on top of the devastating fire at the Museu Nacional (“National Museum”) in Rio de Janeiro in 2018 and the 2015 fire at the Museum of the Portuguese Language, among others. According to Globo’s Jornal Nacional:

This building housed one million documents from the former Embrafilme* such as scripts, paper archives, copies of films, and antique equipment. Some of this material was more than 100 years old and was going to be used to set up a museum about the history of Brazilian cinema.

According to the Fire Department, the blaze started around 6:30 p.m. … According to the Fire Department, nobody was injured. This was, at least, the third recorded accident since the warehouse was inaugurated.

This same building had caught fire in 2016. About 500 works were destroyed. The majority had copies. In February of 2020, the building was hit by a flood.

Management of Cinemateca was handed over to the federal government in August 2020. Eight months later, in April of this year, the Cinemateca employees released a statement calling attention to the institution’s abandonment situation and they asked for clarifications from the Secretaria Nacional do Audiovisual [“National Audiovisual Secretariat”] about the implementation of the emergency plan announced by Culture Secretary Mário Frias in December 2020.

*Embrafilme was a state-owned company for the purpose of promoting, funding, and producing Brazilian movies. It was founded in 1969 and dissolved (privatized) in 1990. Film financing and regulation has been taken on by Ancine, a federal agency created in 2001.