By RAY KELLY
Orson Welles’ doomed movie on the plight of impoverished Brazilian fishermen is the subject of a new documentary, A Jangada de Welles (The Welles Raft).
The 75-minute documentary looks at Welles’ aborted wartime South American movie, It’s All True; filming in Fortaleza, the drowning death of national hero Manuel “Jacare” Olimpio Meira during the shoot; the repressive Getúlio Varga regime; and the Ceará fishermen’s struggle for labor rights and housing.
A Jangada de Welles was written and directed by Brazilian filmmakers Petrus Cariry and Firmino Holanda.
The Fortaleza-born Cariry has made such movies as Quando o Vento Sopra and O Grão. Holanda is a professor of film studies at Universidade Federal do Ceará and author of the book Orson Welles no Ceará. The pair collaborated in 2004 on O Cidadão Jacaré (Citizen Jacaré), which looked at the 61-day journey of the four jangadeiros.
The filmmakers told Wellesnet they expect A Jangada de Welles to make its U.S. festival debut by March, and then be available for streaming.
A Jangada de Welles had its world premiere on October 26 at the 43rd annual International Film Festival in São Paulo. It was screened three times during the course of the two-week festival.
The documentary makes use of archival footage of the participants from the 1942 shoot: Welles, Meira, Francisca Moreira da Silva, Grande Otelo, and Richard and Elizabeth Wilson, as well as noted It’s All True expert Catherine L. Benamou.
Welles’ aborted wartime South American shoot was the subject of an award-winning 1993 documentary It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles from Richard Wilson, former Focus! editor-publisher Myron Meisel and Bill Krohn of Cahiers du Cinéma.
It’s All True was to have been Welles’ third film for RKO Radio Pictures, after Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. The project was a co-production of RKO and the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.
During filming, RKO underwent major management changes. Nelson Rockefeller, the primary backer of the Latin America project, left its board of directors, and Welles’ chief backer, studio president George Schaefer, resigned. The new faces at RKO were hostile toward Welles and drastically edited The Magnificent Ambersons while he was out of the country. The Latin America project was subsequently shelved.
Fired by RKO, Welles unsuccessfully attempted to find backing and release It’s All True.
The footage was believed lost, but 309 cans of black-and-white nitrate negative and five cans of unidentified positive film was discovered in the Paramount Pictures vault by Fred Chandler, director of technical services, in 1981.
The 1993 documentary includes scenes from two parts of the film: My Friend Bonito, directed in Mexico by Norman Foster, and the Welles-helmed Carnaval/ The Story of Samba, shot in Rio. It concludes with a reconstruction of the third segment, Jangadeiros/ Four Men on a Raft, directed by Welles in Fortaleza.
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