The Brazilian documentary A Jangada de Welles (The Welles Raft) will have its European premiere later this month at the Toulouse Latin America Film Festival in France.
The 75-minute documentary looks at Welles’ aborted wartime South American movie, It’s All True; filming in Fortaleza, Brazil; 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 will be screened at the 32nd Cinélatino – Rencontres de Toulouse, which is scheduled for March 20-29.
The documentary 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 have told Wellesnet they expect A Jangada de Welles to be screened at a U.S. festival and then be available for streaming.
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 scholar Catherine L. Benamou.
Welles’ aborted wartime South American shoot was the subject of the 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. (The late Brazilian filmmaker Rogerio Sganzerla did multiple films on Welles and It’s All True.)
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 a major shakeup. Nelson Rockefeller, the primary backer of the Latin America project, left its board of directors, and Welles’ chief supporter, 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.
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