Orlando Senna, figure of the new wave of Brazilian cinema, 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, the ministry announced on Tuesday Brazilian Culture. Senna devoted his career to “The defense of culture as an instrument of social transformation”greeted the ministry in a press release on Instagram welcoming « his work, his generosity and his commitment 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. This road movie tells the story of 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.”according to the French cinema library website.

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Trainer of Latin American filmmakers

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 Garcáa Márquez and Fernando Birri, and worked to train generations of Latin American filmmakers. In the 2000s, he was National Secretary for Audiovisual, from where he promoted cultural policies to on a national and regional scale. He was one of the architects of the creation of the public television channel TV Brasil.