Orlando Senna, figure of cinema and culture in Brazil, died at 86

Brazilian filmmaker Orlando Senna, linked to the Cinema Novo movement, the new wave of Brazilian cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, died at the age of 86, it was announced on Tuesday 9 June, the Brazilian Ministry of Culture.

Senna a consecrated his carrière à “the defense of culture as an instrument of social transformation”, greeted the ministry in a statement on Instagram welcoming “his work, his generosity and his dedication to Brazilian culture”.

Director, screenwriter, writer, journalist, playwright and cultural manager, his most emblematic work is Iracema (1975), co-directed with Jorge Bodanzky, a classic of Brazilian cinema which addresses the social impacts of the occupation of the Amazon during the military dictatorship. It was notably presented at the Semaine de la critique in 1976.

Ce road movie recounts the journey on the Trans-Amazonian Highway of a white trucker and a young mixed-race prostitute, filmed with light means: “Deforestation, insecurity, corruption, slavery: the docu-fiction unfolds the real problems of the rapidly changing region, the better to thwart Brazilian government propaganda”résume le site de la Cinémathèque française.

Originally from the state of Bahia, where he was born in 1940, Orlando Senna also directed between 1991 and 1994 the International School of Cinema and Television of San Antonio de los Baños (EICTV), in Cuba, founded by the writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Fernando Birri, Thus working to train generations of Latin American filmmakers.

In the 2000s, he was national audiovisual secretary, from where he promoted cultural policies on a national and regional scale. He was one of the architects of the creation of the public television channel TV Brasil.