Work is underway in Brazil on an animated film recounting the story of the four jangadeiros, whose heroic journey in 1941 was the subject of the aborted Orson Welles film It’s All True.
Jangadeiros da São Pedro (Rafters of Saint Pedro) will tell the story of the four fishermen who traveled on a raft from the state of Ceará to Rio de Janeiro to meet the president, Getúlio Vargas, according to Juliana von Schmalz of Viu Cine, which is producing the film.
Rafters of Saint Pedro was first announced in 2020.
“The pandemic really got in the way of the process of production of the project,” she said. “Originally, we were supposed to do a serial documentary totally in live action, but because of the pandemic we had to be creative to conclude the project, so we added animation. Only after that we had the idea of making an almost fully animated movie.”
von Schmalz shared two minutes of vibrant animated footage with Wellesnet. It has a Portuguese soundtrack and English subtitles.
“The movie will include real images depicting what happened and for this we would like to be able to use images from excerpts of the documentary It’s All True,” von Schmalz told Wellesnet.
The producers recently reached out to Paramount Pictures, which holds the rights to the footage Welles shot for RKO Pictures in 1942, she said.
Last year, Paramount began scanning the surviving footage, which is housed at the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
The UCLA archive houses 28,000 feet of Jangadeiros (Four Men on a Raft), as well as 75,145 feet of My Friend Bonito and 32,200 feet of Carnaval, according to Catherine Benamou, author of It’s All True: Orson Welles’s Pan-American Odyssey and associate producer and senior researcher on the 1993 documentary It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles.
It was during the editing The Magnificent Ambersons that Welles, at the urging of Nelson Rockefeller – an RKO Radio Pictures stockholder and the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in the Roosevelt Government – took on a multipart film to improve relations between the U.S. and South America. Welles’ colleague, Norman Foster, directed a segment, My Friend Bonito, in Mexico, and Welles went to Rio de Janeiro to film footage of the carnival as well as a story about four fishermen, known as jangadeiros, who sailed a raft from the port of Fortaleza to Rio.
RKO shelved the project when it terminated Welles and Mercury Productions amid accusations of extravagance by Welles in Brazil and the recutting of Ambersons.
The footage remained in the vault when RKO was acquired by Desilu Productions in 1957. A decade later, the footage came under the control of Paramount Pictures when the studio acquired Desilu. At the urging of Fred Chandler, then director of technical services at Paramount, the footage was donated to the American Film Institute in the 1980s. The AFI arranged for the footage to be stored at the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
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