[Commlist] Unmissable: Symposium Walter Salles

On the occasion of the University of Reading’s conferment of an 
*Honorary Degree* to Brazil’s iconic filmmaker, *WALTER SALLES*, a 
symposium in his honour will take place on 30^th June-1^st July, 
addressing his oeuvre and artistic vision, including a keynote by the 
director himself. *See full programme below*.

*This event will take place in person only. Attendance is free but 
places are limited. To book a place, please click*here 
<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eventbrite.co.uk%2Fe%2Fwalter-salles-symposium-tickets-346600269737&data=05%7C01%7Cl.nagib%40reading.ac.uk%7C0dc37d848fc74ab66bd308da3fe3d432%7C4ffa3bc4ecfc48c09080f5e43ff90e5f%7C0%7C0%7C637892544990764735%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=HuyjHmWTC6FqAMYB95VEO1YL6E6ggfdwgudN3etlzCk%3D&reserved=0>. 


A ticket gives you the right to attend the event in full or any parts of it.

Further information: (l.nagib /at/ reading.ac.uk) <mailto:(l.nagib /at/ reading.ac.uk)>

*WALTER SALLES SYMPOSIUM*

*Convened by Lúcia Nagib*

*Sponsored by: Department of Film, Theatre & Television; School of Art 
and Communication Design; CFAC – Centre for Film Aesthetics and Culture*

**

*30^th June – 1^st July 2022*

Minghella Studios

Whiteknights Campus, Shinfield Road

University of Reading

Reading RG6 6BT

United Kingdom

*Walter Salles*’s filmic work centres on issues of national identity and 
displacement. /Foreign Land /(/Terra estrangeira/), which focused on the 
Brazilian political turmoil of the early 1990s, received the prize for 
Best Brazilian Film in 1995. /Central Station/ (/Central do Brasil/) won 
the Golden Bear and the Silver Bear for best actress at the 1998 Berlin 
Film Festival. During its development, /Central Stations/’s screenplay 
received the Sundance/ NHK award. His other films received prizes at the 
Cannes (/Linha de Passe/), Venice (/Behind the Sun/), and San Sebastian 
Film Festivals. Salles also won the Golden Globe and the British BAFTA 
twice (/The Motorcycle Diaries /and /Central Station/). Films that 
Salles has directed or produced have received a total of 8 Oscar 
nominations, including one win for /The Motorcycle Diaries/. In 2014, 
Salles directed /Jia Zhangke, a guy from Fenyang/, a documentary on the 
Chinese independent film director. /The World of Jia Zhangke/, a book 
with interviews conducted by Salles and Jean-Michel Frodon, was launched 
at the 2014 São Paulo International Film Festival. Salles is also a 
producer of first features made by young directors from Brazil, such as 
Karim Aïnouz, Sérgio Machado, Eryk Rocha and Flávia Castro. In 2020, 
Salles received the FIAF Award, in recognition of his work in film 
preservation. He was also the recipient of the Robert Bresson Award from 
the Venice Film Festival, and the Marc’Antonio d’Oro Award from the Rome 
Film Festival.

*PROGRAMME*

**

*30 June 2022*

16:00-16:15 - Opening address – *Lúcia Nagib*

16:15-18:25 – Screening: /The Passenger/ (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975): 
‘The film that made me a filmmaker’

18:25-18:30 – Comfort break

18:30-19:30 – *Walter Salles* in conversation with *Laura Mulvey*

19:30-20:00 – Reception

*01 July 2022*

10:00-11:30 - Panel 1

*Tiago de Luca*: ‘/Central Station, /Revisited’

*Stephanie Dennison*: ‘/When the Earth Trembles/: Walter Salles and 
BRICS filmmaking’

*Natália Pinazza*: ‘On Board: Vehicles in Walter Salles’ Films’

11:30-11:45 – Coffee break

11:45-13:15 – Panel 2

*Claire Williams*: 'Looking for Latin America: Identity in /The 
Motorcycle Diaries/'

*Cecília Mello*: ‘Walter Salles and China: breaching an antipodal 
distance, affectively’

*Lúcia Nagib*: ‘Deconstructing Foundational Myths: /Foreign Land/’s 
Geography of Exclusion’

13:15-14:15 – Lunch

14:15-15:15 – Keynote Speech

*Walter Salles*: ‘What can cinema do for us today?’

15:15-15:30 – Tea break

15:30-16:50 – Screening: /Central Station /(Walter Salles, 1998)

16:50-17:00 – Comfort break

17:00-18:30 – *Walter Salles* in conversation with *Geoff Andrew*

*ABSTRACTS *

**

*‘/Central Station, /Revisited’*

*Tiago de Luca*

/Central Station /(/Central do Brasil, /Walter Salles, 1998) was the 
most emblematic film to emerge from the Retomada (Brazilian Film 
Revival). It accordingly received voluminous critical and scholarly 
attention upon and after its release, often in relation to questions of 
national identity and its perceived aestheticisation of the /sertão/. In 
this paper I want to revisit this film from today’s perspective and thus 
away from the debates that overdetermined much of its critical 
reception. With the benefit of hindsight, some features of the film fall 
into the background while others become newly salient in return. In 
particular, I would like to explore the role played by physical objects 
in the film and how they accrue semiotic value through the narrative as 
it unfolds over a specified time period. In a similar gesture, I want to 
look at these objects and the film itself /in time/, that is, from a 
contemporary standpoint that compels us to see /Central Station/ in a 
new light and as a historical object in its own right.

*‘/When the Earth Trembles/: Walter Salles and BRICS filmmaking’*

*Stephanie Dennison*

This paper will discuss Walter Salles’ 2017 contribution to a 
portmanteau film, /Where Has Time Gone?/, the first in a series of films 
co-produced by Jia Zhangke, made to showcase cultural cooperation among 
the BRICS countries. The contribution, entitled /When the Earth 
Trembles/, is a fictional account of the aftermath of the real-life 
mudslides caused by a dam bursting in Mariana, Minas Gerais, with loss 
of life and the displacement of hundreds of inhabitants. I will begin 
with a brief contextualising of the film in Salles’ other contributions 
to international portmanteau films, before turning my attention to the 
Mariana environmental disaster, and the broader context of BRICS filmmaking.

**

*‘On Board: Vehicles in Walter Salles’ Films’*

*Natália Pinazza*

There has been a marked increase in road movies in Latin America since 
the 1990s with filmmakers from the region breaking into the global 
market. In this context, the work of Walter Salles emerges as a unique 
and pertinent contribution to the road movie genre, interweaving 
journeys of self-discovery and national and even regional concerns as 
with the case of /The Motorcycle Diaries/. This paper will analyse a 
selected body of Salles’ films and the ways in which vehicles, a 
quintessential motif of the road movie genre, inform the dramatic 
structure of the journey. In focusing on vehicles and their impact on 
the narrative structure in Salles’ work, this paper will examine the 
extent to which they create a distinctive cinematic language.

**

*‘Looking for Latin America: Identity in /The Motorcycle Diaries/’*

*Claire Williams*

Walter Salles’s /The Motorcycle Diaries /(/Los diarios de motocicleta, 
/2014) is a truly pan-American film. It can be read on many levels: as a 
road movie, a historical travel documentary, a travelogue and guide to 
sites of symbolic or tourist significance across Latin America, and a 
representation of two young men’s rites of passage. This paper will 
consider the construction of a Latin American identity that recognises 
differences and celebrates common struggles.

**

*‘Walter Salles and China: breaching an antipodal distance, affectively’*

*Cecília Mello *

My paper will focus on Walter Salles’s relationship with the People’s 
Republic of China – its geography, people, culture and cinema. Salles 
has made some significant visits to China, the first as a teenager in 
1979, travelling as far as Guilin near the border with Vietnam, at a 
time when the two countries fought a brief war. The second visit 
happened in the 1980s, when he supervised and later edited the 
documentary /China: The Empire of the Centre/, directed by his brother 
João Moreira Salles, a profound gaze upon the country as it was being 
reshaped by Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. The documentary opened a window 
into China after decades of isolation, and was broadcast in two parts by 
TV Manchete. Notwithstanding the major differences in style, the 
documentary invites comparisons with Antonioni’s /Cina, /made in the 
early 1970s for television channel RAI. Antonioni is also behind some of 
the affinities between Walter Salles and his Chinese colleague Jia 
Zhangke, who prompted another visit to China and who is affectionately 
portrayed in Salles’s 2014 documentary, /Jia Zhangke: A Guy from 
Fenyang. /In this documentary, intertextuality works as a means to 
reflect upon China’s unprecedented transformations and upon the place 
and the role of cinema within them.

**

*‘Deconstructing Foundational Myths: /Foreign Land/’s Geography of 
Exclusion’*

*Lúcia Nagib*

/Foreign Land /(/Terra estrangeira/),//directed by Walter Salles and 
Daniella Thomas in 1995, has gained new relevance in the face of 
Brazil’s disastrous government currently in power. It allows us to view 
today’s political crisis not as a historical blip, but as the result of 
foundational myths dating back to the country’s colonial past. The film 
focuses on the election and brief ruling of a previous nefarious 
government in the early 1990s, which caused a massive exodus of 
unemployed Brazilians to the old colonial centre, Portugal. Shot mainly 
on location in São Paulo, Lisbon and Cape Verde, it promotes the 
encounter of Lusophone peoples who find common ground in their marginal 
situation. Viewed from afar, their native countries are reduced to 
invisible proportions, despite their great territorial extensions. Even 
Portugal is defined by its location at the edge of Europe and by beliefs 
such as Sebastianism, whose origins go back to the time when it was 
dominated by Spain. As a result, notions of ‘core’ or ‘centre’ are 
devolved to the realm of myth. This paper attempts to demonstrate how a 
perspectival shift between great and small, centre and periphery 
permeates the film at all levels and accounts for its enduring qualities.

**

*Keynote Speech: ‘What can cinema do for us today?’*

*Walter Salles *

At a time of radical changes to the way we interact with our 
surroundings, can cinema still serve as a powerful medium to unveil the 
world? In this talk, I will endeavour to look back at the invention of 
the cinematograph, the Lumière brothers and Thomas Edison as an attempt 
to shed light on this debate.

*BIOGRAPHIES*

*Geoff Andrew* is Programmer-at-large for BFI Southbank. Formerly Head 
of Film Programme for BFI Southbank, he was also film editor of /Time 
Out/ magazine for many years, and is a regular contributor to /Sight & 
Sound/; he is also a programme advisor to the BFI London Film Festival. 
His numerous books on the cinema including studies of Nicholas Ray and 
the American ‘indie’ filmmakers of the 1980s and ‘90s, and BFI Classics 
monographs on Kieslowski’s /Three Colours Trilogy/ and Kiarostami’s 
/10/. He is the editor of /Sight & Sound/’s ‘Auteurs Series’ anthologies 
devoted to Jean-Luc Godard and Martin Scorsese. He has contributed to 
many anthologies and DVD extras, lectured widely on the cinema, and 
served on film festival juries in Cannes, Venice, Istanbul, Turin, 
Krakow, Morelia, Sarajevo and elsewhere. In 2009 the French government 
made him a /Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. /He writes on 
film, music and the other arts at geoffandrew.com 
<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgeoffandrew.com%2F&data=05%7C01%7Cl.nagib%40reading.ac.uk%7C0dc37d848fc74ab66bd308da3fe3d432%7C4ffa3bc4ecfc48c09080f5e43ff90e5f%7C0%7C0%7C637892544990764735%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=lSHK%2Beww0gT6pmLX3BppSjDngKet5l3gJh54e5SmlrA%3D&reserved=0>.

*Dr Tiago de Luca* is Reader in Film Studies at the University of 
Warwick. He is the author of /Planetary Cinema: Film, Media and the 
Earth/ (2022) and /Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience 
of Physical Reality /(2014), and the co-editor of /Slow Cinema/ (2016) 
and /Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema/ (2022). He is 
the editor, with Lúcia Nagib, of the /Film Thinks/ series (Bloomsbury).

*Prof Stephanie Dennison*holds a Chair in Brazilian Studies at the 
University of Leeds, where she directs the Centre for World Cinemas and 
Digital Cultures. She led an AHRC-funded project on soft power, 
filmmaking and the BRICS countries. Her two most recent books are the 
monograph /Remapping Brazilian Film Culture in the Twenty-first/ 
/Century /(Routledge, 2020) and the co-edited volume /Cinema and Soft 
Power: Configuring the National and Transnational in Geo-politics 
/(Edinburgh University Press, 2021).

*Prof **Cecília Mello* is Professor of Film at the Department of Film, 
Radio and Television, University of São Paulo, Brazil, and currently 
Visiting Scholar at King’s College London. She is the author of /The 
Cinema of Jia Zhangke: Realism and Memory in Chinese Film /(London: 
Bloomsbury, 2019).

*Prof Laura Mulvey* is Professor of Film at Birkbeck College, University 
of London. She is the author of: /Visual and Other Pleasures/ (Macmillan 
1989/2009), /Fetishism and Curiosity/ (British Film Institute 
1996/2013), /Citizen Kane /(BFI Classics series 1992/2012), /Death 
Twenty- four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image /(Reaktion 
Books 2006) and /Afterimages: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times 
/(Reaktion Books 2019). She made six films in collaboration with Peter 
Wollen including /Riddles of the Sphinx/ (British Film Institute 1977; 
dvd 2013) and /Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti/ (Arts Council 1980).  With 
artist/filmmaker Mark Lewis, she has made /Disgraced Monuments /(Channel 
4 1994) and /23 August 2008/ (2013).

*Prof Lúcia Nagib* is Professor of Film at the University of Reading. 
Her research has focused, among other subjects, on polycentric 
approaches to world cinema, new waves and new cinemas, cinematic realism 
and intermediality. She is the author of many books, including /Realist 
Cinema as World Cinema: Non-cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema 
/(Amsterdam University Press, 2020), /World Cinema and the Ethics of 
Realism /(Bloomsbury, 2011) and /Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New 
Cinema, Utopia/ (I.B. Tauris, 2007). Her edited books include /Impure 
Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film /(with Anne 
Jerslev, I.B. Tauris, 2013), /Theorizing World Cinema /(with Chris 
Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah, I.B. Tauris, 2011), /Realism and the 
Audiovisual Media /(with Cecília Mello, Palgrave, 2009) and /The New 
Brazilian Cinema/ (I.B. Tauris, 2003). She is the writer and director, 
with Samuel Paiva, of the award-winning feature-length documentary, 
/Passages /(UK 2019).

*Dr Natália Pinazza* is a lecturer in Portuguese Studies at the 
University of Exeter. She holds a PhD and MA from the University of Bath 
and a BA from the University of São Paulo. Her research interests centre 
on journey narratives, film industry and issues of transnational cinema 
with a particular focus on Latin America and the Portuguese-speaking 
world. Her book /Journeys in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema: Road Movies 
in a Global Era/ was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014. Her other 
books as an editor include /World Film Location São Paulo/ (2013)/,/ 
/World Cinema Directory: Brazil /(2013), /New Approaches to Lusophone 
Culture /(2016) and /Journeys on Screen: Theory, Ethics, Aesthetics 
/(2018)/. /

*Walter Salles *(for Wlater Salles’s biography, please see the beginning 
of this document)

Walter Salles’s Filmography (from 1995 onwards)

2022- /I’m Still Here/ (in development)

2017 – /When the Earth Trembles/, a short for /Where Has Time Gone/

2015 – /Jia Zhang-ke, a guy from Fenyang/
2013 – /The Square/- a short for Venice 70: Future Reloaded – La 
Biennale di Venezia.
2012 – /On the Road/
2008 – /Linha de Passe/ (co-directed by Daniela Thomas)
2007 – /A 8.944km de Cannes/ and /Letter to V/- shorts for /Chacun son 
cinema/, for the 60^th Cannes Film Festival
2006 – /Loin du 16eme/, a short for /Paris je t’aime/
2005 – /Dark Water/
2004 – /The Motorcycle Diaries/
2002 – /Un petit message du Brésil/, a short for the Quinzaine des 
Réalisateurs for the Cannes Film Festival
2001 – /Behind the Sun/
2000 – /Midnight /(co-directed by Daniela Thomas)
1998 – /Central Station/
1995 – /Foreign Land/ (co-directed by Daniela Thomas)

*Dr **Claire Williams*is Associate Professor in Brazilian Literature and 
Culture at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on twenty and 
twenty-first century women’s writing, minority writing and life-writing 
from the Lusophone world, and her research interests include cinema and 
translation.


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