Eduardo Coutinho

Eduardo Coutinho 19332014 enjoyed an extraordinary career in the Brazilian film industry mainly as a documentarist He was born in São Paulo Brazil He is a contemporary of many Cinema Novo filmmakers friend and colleague of several of them but he only became a director at the beginning of the 1980s almost at the age of fifty in a context entirely different from that of Brazil in the 1960s He also studied law theatre and journalism in which he worked for many years He is the author of articles on the Brazilian film industry published in newspapers and magazines His first contact with the film world was at a seminar in 1954 but from then until 1957 he was the editor of Visão magazine and later decided to take up film studies at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies IDHEC in Paris He worked on the script or in the production of major films directed by Leon Hirzsman A Falecida Garota de Ipanema Eduardo Escorel Lição de Amor Bruno Barreto Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands and Zelito Viana Os Condenados In 1975 Coutinho joined the Globo Repórter team where he remained for nine years and according to its director it was an important learning curve that convinced him to move into documentary films In spite of censorship the team made up of Paulo Gil Soares João Batista de Andrade Jorge Bodansky and Oswaldo Caldeira among others managed to go indepth into a number of topics Coutinhos documentaries from this period include Seis Dias em Ouricuri on the drought and the hard labour in the outback O Pistoleiro de Serra Talhada on banditry in the northeast O Imperador do Sertão on Colonel Teodorico Bezerra and O Menino de Brodósqui on the painter Cândido Portinari