Cinematheque reopens this Friday with an exhibition dedicated to Zé do Caixão

Closed since 2020, the headquarters of Cinemateca Brasileira reopens its doors, this Friday (13), in São Paulo, for an exhibition dedicated to the late filmmaker José Mojica Marins, famous for the character “Zé do Caixão”.

Cinemateca had been closed since August 2020, and during this period, it faced a flooding and a fire in the shed with the entity’s collection, in the west of the capital of São Paulo, in addition to a long legal obstacle on the management of the institution.

With sessions on the 13th, 14th and 15th of May, the exhibition “O Cinema Sem Medo de Mojica” starts this Friday with the screening of an unpublished film by the actor from Zé do Caixão. The medium-length film “A Praga” (1980) was restored and finished by producer Eugenio Puppo.

He found the film cans lost in the late filmmaker’s office, when he was organizing, in 2007, a retrospective of Mojica, who was the author of the first Brazilian horror film: “À Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul” (1964).

Tickets for the show are free, and are distributed to the public one hour before the sessions.

“Mojica’s films are currently undergoing restoration work, under the coordination of Paulo Sacramento, who is also a partner of the institution. The work has been preserved over the years, so being able to open with this film clipping and having as a motto the presentation of the film that was rescued, going through a long recovery process, has everything to do with this moment of Cinemateca”, said the technical director. Gabriela de Sousa Queiroz.

Throughout the weekend, “little shown” films by Mojica will be part of the exhibition.

““Incarnation of the Devil”, which closes the saga of the character Zé do Caixão; “Terror Trilogy”, a film in episodes that he co-directed with Ozualdo Candeias and Luís Sérgio Person; “Awakens the Beast,” with its psychedelic horror and cynical look at power games; and “Black Exorcism”, a metalinguistic nightmare in which the creator faces his creature”, informs Cinemateca.

The technical director says that, after a year and a half closed “due to flooding, fire and an abandonment process”, the Cinemateca reopens “with new expectations”.

In November 2021, the Special Secretariat for Culture, of the Ministry of Tourism, selected the Sociedade Amigos da Cinemateca (SAC) in a public notice, to enter into a management contract for the institution. The entity is responsible for carrying out activities for the custody, preservation, documentation and dissemination of the audiovisual collection of national production through the management, operation and maintenance of the Cinematheque.

The new director of the space is the retired professor of the School of Communications and Arts of the University of São Paulo (USP), Maria Dora Mourão. In addition to the technical director Gabriela de Sousa Queiroz, Marco Antônio Alves assumes the administrative and financial directorship. The term of office is four years.

Cinemateca was managed by the Associação de Comunicação Recreativa Roquette Pinto (Acerp), a social organization based in Rio de Janeiro that had already managed TV Escola for the federal government since 2018. The contract ended at the end of 2019 and did not has been renovated.

In August 2020, all employees linked to Acerp were fired and the federal government resumed management, promising to launch a new public notice to choose a new management entity – which only happened the morning after the fire, in July 2021. .

The delay in publishing the rules for the process had been criticized by the audiovisual sector. As revealed to CNN the Federal Public Ministry even questioned what it called “financial strangulation and administrative abandonment” of the institution and alerted the government, in a hearing on July 20, of the possibility of a fire in the Cinemateca facilities.

* João Luiz Sampaio contributed to this report