Brazilian filmmaker Orlando Senna passes away at 86

Orlando Senna. Pic/Orlando`s Instagram

Brazilian filmmaker Orlando Senna has passed away. He was 86. As per Variety, Orlando died on June 9 from pneumonia in Rio de Janeiro.

Senna reached everlasting fame as director with Jorge Bodanzky of 1974's "Iracema" ("Iracema: Uma Transa Amazonica"), a hard-hitting social realist feature sometimes ranked in lists of the best Brazilian films of all time.

It is sometimes cited as a high-profile title in Brazil's Cinema Novo, though in reality by that time the movement had pretty much run its course and the film is lightyears away from the style of, say, Glauber Rocha.

What it did share with earlier Cinema Novo movies was a sense of subversion and exposure of Brazil's gross poverty. It follows Iracema (Edna de Cassia), 14, who leaves her home in the Amazon to become a prostitute in Belem and hitches up with Tiao, a truck driver on a trip down the newly opened Trans-Amazonian Highway, which affords a portrait of ecological devastation and a hapless Indigenous population, as per Variety.

He also co-wrote Hector Babenco's feature debut "King of the Night," a withering portrait of 1920s-set toxic masculinity. Senna made his last film in 2020, "Longe do Paraiso."

By that time, he had won respect - and an outlet for his energy - as head from 1991-94 of Cuba's San Antonio de los Banos International School of Film and TV School, co-founded by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

He also served under Culture Minister Gilberto Gil as head of Brazil's National Audiovisual Secretariat from 2003-07 and as general director of TV Brasil, president of Television de America Latina between 2008 and 2015, as well as programming director for CineBrasil TV and advisor to Sao Paulo agency Spcine.

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