João Moreira Salles | María Campaña Ramia
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Eduardo Coutinho at 93: His Next Films
Written and adapted by João Moreira Salles for our catalogue
On May 11th, 2026, Eduardo Coutinho would have turned 93 years old. If he were still with us, which films would he be making?
I knew Coutinho for more than twenty years, and about him I had only three certainties: that once a meeting was set, he would never be late; that he would arrive smoking; and that he would come with a shoulder bag slung across his body. Any other prediction would be more or less like betting on horses (he enjoyed the races at the Jockey Club—he thought they were beautiful). Although I produced several of his films, it was only in retrospect that I was able to glimpse the thread linking one documentary to the next. Why Jogo de Cena (Playing, 2007) after O Fim e o Princípio (The End and the Beginning, 2005)? How do we get from Moscou (Moscow, 2009) to As Canções (The Songs, 2011)?
Taken literally, then, the question in the first paragraph sounds rhetorical—it cannot really be answered. But we can speculate if we treat it as a thought experiment.
Let me begin with what I know for sure.
Coutinho’s next film would still be a film built around conversation—or, recalling an idea that was very, very dear to him, a cinema of the spoken word. “I discovered the word through the absence I felt in everything I saw in film,” he told me in 2012.
Coutinho’s next film would feature people that the audience would not recognize on the street: mostly anonymous individuals, many of them modest or poor. None of them would be there as representatives of a sociological category. They would represent no one but themselves. In this next film, no character would be condemned in advance to fit an expected role. A factory worker might take pride in the piece produced by his labor. A domestic worker might identify politically with her employer. A woman who makes a living collecting garbage might say that it was only at the dump that she gained autonomy and realized that she was her own person.
There would therefore be—of this I am absolutely certain—characters capable of pulling the rug out from under our convictions. The world according to Coutinho was made of “impurities” that deserved to be celebrated. The real danger, for him, was the opposite: utopia. For him, the two most obscene words in any language were “purity” and “perfection.”
The people in his next film would speak not about the great themes of history, but rather about the events of everyday life—what he sometimes called “the disasters of daily life.” Disasters—and this is crucial—that cannot defeat the person who tells of them. Despite life’s beatings, despite all the hardships, the characters will be intelligent enough to find reasons to keep despair at bay. They will recall—and in doing so, in a way relive—the moments that give meaning to life. It may be solidarity among co-workers, a friendship, a turbulent love affair, a song, a comeback, a compliment received. Sometimes it may seem like little to the viewer. Coutinho will make us see that it is immense for the person who tells it; often it is enough for someone to say that, even if they are not happy, they are at least satisfied and capable of joy.
No one in his next film will be merely a passive subject of circumstances. No one will be only a victim. The film will try to be worthy of the stories, to rise to what is at stake, and to honor the importance that these moments have for those who have lived them.
Coutinho would not make his next film about people like himself. It would not be a film about intellectuals, filmmakers, TV directors, or journalists—about people who inhabit his mental world and share the same cultural references. “What interests me is precisely the fact that I have nothing to do with them [the characters in my films],” he would repeat.
That is why he made films about women, workers, peasants, believers; about people with little formal education and from another social class than his. (It is interesting to imagine the reception of this cinema if Coutinho were emerging now—he whose recognition preceded the current advent of identity politics.)
“I want to talk with a woman because I don’t know what it’s like to give birth. I want to talk with a Black man because I don’t know what it’s like to be discriminated against because of the color of my skin.” He wanted to know, although he was fully aware of the limits of that desire. He knew that the part that escapes the camera will always be greater than the part that reveals itself. For him, the fact that part of a character will always remain unknowable was a strength, not a weakness. Any totalizing claim, as a form of utopian thinking, was an abomination to him.
These are my certainties. They may give the impression that Coutinho’s next film would simply be the same film again—but that is not the case. Coutinho never repeated himself, and that is one of the great beauties of his cinema. His work is not a collection of isolated films, but rather a process through which cinema is explored. In this sense, he is one of the few Brazilian filmmakers who can truly be said to have an oeuvre—understood here as being a whole richer than the sum of its parts.
Each film moves one square ahead of the previous one, like someone who, step by step, frame by frame, comes ever closer to the frontier beyond which cinema dissolves. His work allows us to gauge the minimum required for a film to remain a film. One need only think of what Coutinho gradually leaves behind as he moves forward: plot, script, narration, musical score, camera movement—the basic tools of the trade.
This always happens gradually, from one film to the next. Consider, for example, the documentaries mentioned earlier.
In O Fim e o Princípio, Coutinho decides to begin shooting without knowing what he will film. The idea is to discover the film’s subject during production. He eventually finds a community deeply rooted in a rich oral tradition. Convinced—at least temporarily—that he would hardly encounter characters capable of narrating their own lives so powerfully again, in the next film he sets aside the first-person accounts that had until then formed the basis of all his cinema in order to explore the emotional truths of stories told by those who did not live them. This is what happens in Jogo de Cena, a film that calls into question any attempt to establish a judgment—whether moral or epistemological—about the superiority of the authentic over the performed, or the performed over the authentic. Which work is more real? It is impossible to say, at least within the framework of his cinema.
If in Jogo de Cena Coutinho directed the scene, in Moscou he steps back from that role and hands it over to the theatre director Enrique Díaz. Coutinho—whose method had always been the opposite of observation—now places himself in the position of one who mainly observes. Yet, as Jean Rouch had already shown, observation is not passive. The observer here is Eduardo Coutinho, and the actors of the theater troupe Grupo Galpão know it. While rehearsing Three Sisters, they find echoes of Chekhov’s play in their own lives. They know that Coutinho’s cinema is made from intersections between the personal and the universal. These intersections are what they bring to the film, as a gift to Coutinho.
In Jogo de Cena, a lived experience triggers the film’s most emotionally powerful material—the fictional part. Moscou takes the opposite path: fiction brings the real experiences of the actors to the surface. As Canções brings these two movements together. In the film, something was once lived for someone, and that experience became linked to a song. Years later, it is the song—the fictional artifact—that brings back the intensity of the original experience. And so Coutinho moves forward.
But this logic only emerges in retrospect, which may well mean that it is something of an artifice—like finding a pattern simply because one was looking for one. In fact, Coutinho was not a programmatic filmmaker, and he always made it clear that he hated systems of any kind. Nothing was further from him than the methodical construction of an oeuvre built on principles. He preferred contradiction and impasse to coherence.
This much I know: what Coutinho truly disliked was redundancy. “You don’t return to the scene of the crime,” he used to say. This suggests that the next film would try to do something which none of the previous ones had done. Any guess is possible: a film composed entirely of quotations (an old dream whose first sketch was Um Dia na Vida / A Day in the Life, made in 2010, between Moscou and As Canções); a film in which he would ask actors to breathe dramatic, comic, or sentimental emotion into an anodyne text—a recipe, an appliance advertisement, a real estate brochure. I would not even rule out the somewhat absurd possibility of a film about a long conversation with a computer equipped with artificial intelligence. Since such systems are statistical machines that gather and synthesize the entirety of digitized human experience, one can imagine Coutinho’s interest in exploring the nature of that synthesis to find the human ghost that still survives inside the machine.
Among all possible films, however, one in particular comes to mind. It arises from the observation that Coutinho’s cinema gradually adapted to his own physical limitations, to his growing fragility, to the fact that the decades, the cigarettes, and the poor eating habits ultimately reduced his movement through the world. This always seemed to me one of the main reasons why his films gradually became more static: the camera no longer moving through the city, no longer climbing the hills of Rio, no longer traveling to the sertão. Instead, the studio—and the chair where the director, with his fragile health, could wait for the characters to arrive.
Coutinho spoke of thought as “a secretion of the body.” The same was true of the cinema he invented. Coutinho’s body shaped the course of his work. I imagine him at ninety-three, unable to move, making a film from his bed—at home or in a hospital. Instead of selecting characters, which would have required an energy he likely no longer had, he would reverse the equation: the characters would now choose him. They would come to ask him questions. And he, of course, would be interested in the questions and not the answers.
The old documentarian who had received so much from his characters would exchange places with them. They would become Eduardo Coutinho; Eduardo Coutinho would become them. A final and magnificent fusion, revealing at last the loving meaning of his work.
(Originally published in May 2023 on the Instituto Moreira Salles Cinema Blog. Adapted for this retrospective.)
“I Don’t Want to Know What the World Is Like, but What State It’s In”
Fragments from a Conversation with Eduardo Coutinho
Written by María Campaña Ramia for our catalogue
Eduardo Coutinho (São Paulo, 1933 – Rio de Janeiro, 2014) is considered the most influential Brazilian documentary filmmaker of all time. He was undoubtedly one of documentary cinema’s great interviewers, although he avoided using the term interview; he preferred the word conversation, which for him was always an attentive dialogue that unfolded without solemnity.
The text below brings together things which form exactly that: fragments from a long conversation that I had with him on March 14th, 2012, in his office at the Center for the Creation of a Popular Image (CECIP), in downtown Rio de Janeiro. The interview was originally published in the book El Otro Cine – Eduardo Coutinho, the first book-length work in Spanish devoted exclusively to the filmmaker, as part of an initiative accompanying a retrospective of Coutinho’s films which was organized that same year by the International Documentary Film Festival Encuentros del Otro Cine, in Ecuador.
In addition to Coutinho’s answers to specific questions about the films presented in the program, the conversation generated some broader reflections on the meaning of his body of film work, his rigorous method, and his artistic and human vision. For reasons of space and coherence, I have chosen to present Coutinho’s reflections here in the form of thematic blocks.
1. Time and Memory
My thesis is the following: what matters for any person—at least in the West—are these things: origin, family, work, love, sex, illness, pleasure, death. You have death, you have religion. That’s it. Beyond that, you can be Saint Francis of Assisi, you can be Lenin. Those are ways of living. You can be a street sweeper. But that is the core, beginning with origin. Every child has a moment of doubt: “Could it be that my father is not my father?” The fact of having an origin, a family, and a memory of the past—that’s life. That’s why people, in general, tell stories about the past, and for that same reason, it’s rare to find a film with many young people in it: young people live, and they usually don’t remember, because in fact they’ve lived very little. A young person wants to live, not to remember. Now, once you are past thirty, forty years old, you have to talk about the past, and every past—the time that has passed, the time that has been lived—is always poorer than narrated time is. That’s what Walter Benjamin says. Lived time is poorer because what one recounts after twenty years includes lies, truths, overlapping memories, and what might have been and was not. It’s a construction.
2. The Truth of the Encounter
A person tells me about his or her life today, and three days later he or she will tell something else to someone else. So what is truth? That I was there one day in 2001, at the Master Building [for the film Edifício Master / Master, A Building in Copacabana, from 2002], and that I filmed those people for a week. That’s true. Beyond that, I guarantee nothing. If I had filmed a month later, everything might have turned out differently. Now, as for the content itself: facts change; they depend on the moment, on the person relaying them. And, like everything that is expressed in words, they depend on the moment in which they are spoken. This is why I consider that, when I am filming, I am living a unique moment, because the other person’s words are prompted by my presence with the camera, and the experience being narrated is not exactly the same as what the person lived; and that the person will never say the same thing again, either before or afterwards. It may be better or worse, but it will not be the same.
3. Location as a Fixed Setting
Let’s not talk about Cabra Marcado para Morrer (Twenty Years Later, 1984); let’s talk about the period from the 1990s onward. All my films have a central location: a favela with two thousand people, one with five thousand, a building with at most five hundred inhabitants. I do not leave that place, even if they tell me that there is a wonderful person in the building next door. This is an absolutely rigid rule. When I made Peões (Metal Workers, 2004), it was a bit more complicated, because there were one hundred and fifty thousand metal workers spread across the country—for the film I found about two hundred—and in that case the question of location was compromised. Also because it was a film about a historical event. That film did not give me as much pleasure as others did.
4. Brazil, Orality, and Song
The fact that here in Brazil you meet someone and, within five minutes, you are on a first-name basis and practically intimate with them would be inconceivable in a country like France—“Latin,” in quotation marks. There is a level of informality that turns every conversation into a personal relationship, which is something quite different. All the class differences that exist here – because social inequality is real – are somewhat offset by the remarkable ease with which one person can address another. You come across people who express themselves with great clarity but are not able to put that into writing. So orality is an essential aspect of Brazilian culture, because whether people speak well or poorly, with slang or without, they manage to communicate.
[…]
For production reasons, I had to make a film that was cheap and easy. One day I was going to make one film, the next another, and suddenly I thought: “It’s just a matter of finding people in the street who sing!” I filmed As Canções in six days, and it was an absolute pleasure. I had never had such a happy shoot. I knew I was making a popular film.
Look, I sing badly, and I don’t even have a song of my own, but singing means… Think of that woman in Edifício Master who lives alone, who has a pile of records in her living room and plays the player piano. I asked her to sing, and she sang “Nunca,” by Lupicínio Rodrigues, a singer from the state of Rio Grande do Sul who was strongly influenced by bolero, tango, and tragedy, but was working within the samba genre. She sang that song, “Nunca,” which is wonderful. All his songs speak of romantic tragedy: “Nunca nem que o mundo caia sobre mim…” [“Never, not even if the world falls over me…”] And she sings! It doesn’t matter if she doesn’t sing well. Singing professionally—that doesn’t interest me. She is wonderful when she sings. That woman alone, in that room, giving an interview… and suddenly she sings. It’s beautiful! I love that, and I love precisely the person who sings without being a professional, because they have an emotional relationship with a particular song, or with music in general. Without a band, without a guitar, without anything: it was the human voice. The human voice! It’s absolutely wonderful: when that woman sings, and that singing expresses a feeling that is strong in her, there is no emotion that can surpass it.
I say (somewhat exaggerating) that if in Brazil, by chance, all culture had to be destroyed— all literature, all poetry, all visual arts, everything—but if a songbook with its dates remained, then that would already be enough. Because in a country whose people have been largely illiterate and that still has a high level of illiteracy today, who knows Guimarães Rosa, Clarice Lispector? Who has read them? But with music it’s different; everyone can have access to it. And what do you need in music? The lyrics. Because one cannot judge based on the mandolin, or on a particular instrument—that requires an ear that not everyone has. That’s why lyrics must exist, and then comes Roberto Carlos. My thesis was that in As Canções there is no aesthetic judgment. I am interested in music and the relationship it has with life.
5. On Being Political
There is a tendency to think that, in moving from Cabra to making a film like Santo Forte (The Mighty Spirit, 1999), I stopped being political. But I believe that my films continued to be political. For example, in Santo Forte one learns—if one sets aside the idealization of “the people” promoted by left-wing parties—what the people are like and what one has to deal with. One discovers a deeply mystical people who believe in miracles, who are magical, and one also learns how to do politics. Now, being directly political does not interest me. It seems to me that understanding individual issues such as death, aging, and loss is fundamental. That middle-class solitude in an apartment building, for example, exists equally in Moscow, Paris, and Shanghai. That was the tragedy of socialism: it never understood that there is a personal dimension to everything. There is an individual dimension in life that is essential for me, and I think it reaches the political in another way. I do not want answers; I want questions. I do not want to talk about paradise. I want to talk about the world that exists. I don’t want to know what the world is like, but what state it’s in—to gather fragments of the world as it exists.
All cultural debate, whether about high culture or popular culture, has been overtaken, because in a globalized world people move within transnational groups—gay movements, women’s movements, Black movements, youth movements—and that is not negative, because it exists. One has to understand everything that exists and why it exists. I am interested in those dichotomies: popular–high culture, mass culture–popular culture. Identity is something that changes; it is not essential. Like that expression that says: “The Indian is sad.” The Indian is a thousand things! There is no purity. Purity and perfection are the only things that disturb me. Purity and perfection are fascist. So my films are for life because life will always be imperfect, because life will always be incomplete. Perfection is death. That’s it. I am not an optimist, but my films are on the side of life because they accept the imperfections of human beings and of society. I do not want to know about paradise. I want to know what people do in the face of the harshness of life and time. Sometimes they may sing a bolero—that may be it.
That is the core of the issue that politics generally ignores. It only distinguishes between those who are politically engaged, who are militants, and those who are not. But ninety percent of people in the world are suffering, living every day on the margins of any specific ideology. I am interested in them. And that is not anti-political; it is simply another way of arriving at politics.
It’s painful, but the fact is that there are things that do not change, as in a melodrama. In Brazil, for example, forty percent of people in the lower classes don’t have fathers. They are raised by their mother, by an aunt, by a neighbor, or by a grandmother. That is brutal. Brazil is a country in search of the father. The father is absent. The father was shot or simply abandoned the child. In Brazil there are women who have children with seven different men and all of them have left. That is catastrophic. There is no school that can solve that. What can a school do when it enters a world that is already broken? I think that this is where the work needs to be done. I am not a school, I am not the police, I am not a politician, but I would like to find a way for us to understand what that world we talk so much about is like.
That’s why I don’t speak about politics. As a citizen, fine. But I am not interested in the utopia of one hundred years from now. The small utopia is this: to be able to make films, to survive, and to try to change the way the world looks at certain issues. If I managed to change something through documentary filmmaking, then that would already be something.