(Editor’s note: The following is an English translation of a June 16, 2025 report from BBC News Brazil on a documentary that plans to include previously unseen It’s All True footage. The original report in Portuguese can be found online at www.bbc.com/portuguese/articles/cly3llg152vo)
BY FABIO CORREA | BBC News Brazil
BELO HORIZONTE – Orson Welles’ (1915-1985) visit to Brazil represents one of the most legendary chapters in the American filmmaker’s biography.
In 1942, a year after the release of Citizen Kane — considered by some to be the best film in history —, Welles took the lead on a pretentious project with a documentary feel, called It’s All True. After filming in the United States and Mexico, the artist and his team arrived in the city of Rio de Janeiro . The objective was to record the Rio Carnival and reenact the trajectory of the jangadeiros who left Fortaleza and went to meet President Getúlio Vargas in the then capital of the country.
Orson Welles’ Brazilian itinerary, however, had another stop, about which almost nothing has been made public: it was Minas Gerais , more precisely in the historic city of Ouro Preto, where he had followed the traditional Holy Week processions. In the film, these would be a religious counterpoint to the carnival festivities.
The It’s All True project was financed by a partnership between the studio Welles worked with, RKO, and the governments of Brazil and the United States. It was part of the American good neighbor policy during World War II , under the leadership of President Franklin Roosevelt. One of the objectives was to attract Vargas, who was flirting with the Axis countries, to the side of the Allies .
However, the contractors’ dissatisfaction with the realistic direction taken by Welles in Brazil meant that the project was aborted and never completed.
In 1993, parts of the footage filmed in Rio and Fortaleza were reassembled for a documentary of the same name, directed by Richard Wilson, Bill Krohn and Myron Meisel. The film, however, did not feature any scenes from Ouro Preto.
Orson Welles ‘s wanderings through the city in Minas Gerais had practically become a legend: with the passing of time, the film’s oblivion and the disappearance of the footage, there was great uncertainty as to whether the American had actually been there. Until, in 2011, researcher and filmmaker Laura Godoy, 45 years old, decided to start an investigation into her time in Ouro Preto.
Godoy is from Ouro Preto and had heard from his father, the pharmacist and memoirist Victor Godoy, that the American director had passed through the hills of the historic city.
It was known, through reports and photographs from the time, that Orson Welles had been in Belo Horizonte. During his visit to the capital of Minas Gerais, the director, in an interview with a local newspaper, praised the light that fell on the city.
It was also known that he had made a stop in Itabirito, halfway between the capital of Minas Gerais and Ouro Preto. There, he was caught peeing in the river and, moments later, photographed, still zipping up his fly, by a young film buff who had recognized him. Today, Itabirito demands a statue of Welles on the riverbank.
Godoy, with his father’s help, began to put the pieces of the puzzle together, little by little.
“It really became an obsession. Me and him, a pair of detectives with this theme,” she tells BBC News Brasil.
With the help of American researcher Catherine Benamou, who became a consultant on the project, Godoy set out in search of Orson Welles’s traces in Minas.
It took years of searching, on a pilgrimage that went from Brazilian newspaper libraries to archives in various cities in the United States. Until the filmmaker finally found previously unpublished and well-preserved images, filmed by the team of the director of Citizen Kane, of the 1942 Holy Week procession in Ouro Preto.
The discovery took place at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) — but she doesn’t give many details about the find, which will be told in a documentary she is producing.
“I spent years dreaming about these images. Because it was an uncertain thing — what was filmed, whether the material had resisted,” recalls Laura Godoy. “When I saw it, I was very moved. It’s a treasure. The images are from that time, and they are of such good quality that they move me deeply as an Ouro Preto native, a researcher and someone who understands memory as essential to understanding the world we live in today.”
Now, she is putting together, together with the director and fellow Ouro Preto native João Dumans, a documentary about Orson Welles’ time in Ouro Preto and the search for this story.
The documentary’s working title is Welles in the Land of Silence, with a release date scheduled for 2026. The parties are negotiating the release of the 1940s footage with Paramount, the American studio that owns the rights to it.
BBC News Brasil contacted Paramount’s press office to confirm the negotiation and find out more details, but received no response.The scenes show the mining city at a time when access to cinematographic and even photography equipment was rare.
The American director’s lens reveals a different Ouro Preto from the current one. In 1942, the city was still suffering from the economic impact resulting from the loss of its status as capital of Minas Gerais. The seat of the state government had been transferred less than half a century earlier to Belo Horizonte, founded in 1897.
“It is a record, at first, very ethnographic, of this interest [of Welles] in people, of showing them, beyond the places”, adds Laura Godoy.
Documents, period reports and excerpts from the diary of Richard Wilson, Welles’ assistant director in Brazil, join the images discovered by Godoy in the documentary.
The “silence” in the documentary’s title, she says, refers to the religious manifestation of Good Friday, when the city enters a moment of reflection — but not only that.
“It’s also the silence of memory, of the erasure of these images over all these years,” summarizes the filmmaker, also pointing to the people who appear in the footage.
“As it was a very poor population, many people were unable to have photos of their ancestors, to create that photographic memory.”
For her, the old images show that, despite Ouro Preto having become a tourist attraction, it has managed to maintain traditions, such as the Holy Week procession.
The year 2025 marks 110 years since Orson Welles’ birth on May 6th; and 40 years since his death on October 10th.
Decades after its production, the legacy of the man considered one of the inventors of contemporary cinema remains alive and still full of treasures to be discovered or revealed to the public — part of which is kept at UCLA itself.
Historian Josafá Veloso dealt with Orson Welles’ Brazilian adventure in his doctoral thesis at the School of Communication and Arts at the University of São Paulo (ECA-USP).
In his work, the historian gathered reports and historical documents to reconstruct the script for the film planned in the 1940s and which ended up not going ahead.
According to Veloso, this Welles film would mix documentary, farce and fiction, as the filmmaker did “many times later in his career”.
Telegrams sent by Welles recording the progress of production provide clues about what was filmed at the time.
Veloso estimates that there are at least 6 hours of unreleased material filmed by the American in Brazil — including not only Ouro Preto, but also Rio, Niterói, Salvador, Recife and Fortaleza.
The films are both in black and white and in Technicolor (a technique for coloring films that used three rolls of film in three colors each: green, red and blue).
The researcher also estimates that there may be up to 7 hours of recordings of Brazilian music out there — including sounds from the best samba artists and radio stations recorded during Carnival in Rio.
This would be the “icing on the cake” to be found and eventually shown to the public.
It is known that Grande Otelo starred in the part about Carnival; that Herivelto Martins helped Welles choose songs and invite Brazilian artists; and that Pixinguinha , Benedito Lacerda, Dorival Caymmi and Emilinha Borba were filmed.
“They are samba masters who had their music recorded and which was also rearranged by the Cassino da Urca orchestra. Welles took the Brazilian sambas that were successful in the previous Carnival and created a kind of suite, a potpourri “, explains Veloso, director of the documentary Banquete Coutinho , about the Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho (1933-2014). According to Catherine Benamou, consultant on Godoy’s documentary, the unpublished material is of “incalculable” value.
At UCLA, for example, a reenactment of the crossing of more than 2,000 kilometers made by the raftsmen from Ceará was found, who in 1941 set out by sea to demand labor rights for fishermen from Getúlio Vargas . There are also scenes of the São Pedro raft entering Guanabara Bay.
There are also images of the jangadeiros themselves, such as Manoel Olímpio Meira, known as Jacaré — one of the leaders of the movement who drowned during filming.
Due to the issues surrounding the rights to disseminate the images, there is still no forecast for when the material will be fully made available to the general public.
These imbroglios have to do, in part, with the fact that RKO was broken up over the years until it went bankrupt in 1957. It was then bought by the General Tire and Rubber Company, a tire company, which sold it to the production company Desilu Productions. In 1967, Desilu was purchased by Paramount. Last year, Paramount was sold to Skydance Media.
Catherine Benamou says the UCLA Film and Television Archive is helping Paramount plan for preserving the material.
She estimates that the UCLA archives have 23 hours of previously unreleased footage from Brazil, including scenes of the jangadeiros, Carnival and Ouro Preto.
“Other uses will depend on individual negotiations with Paramount about the rights to use the material for specific projects,” says she, a tenured professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of California at Irvine and author of the book It’s All True – The Pan-American Odyssey of Orson Welles , released last year by Editora Unesp in Brazil.
Orson Welles’ Brazilian tour came to an end in July 1942.
During the project, the RKO studio and the US government’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, were already openly opposed to the artistic freedom assumed by the director.
He did not shy away from recording the black population, Afro-Brazilian demonstrations and the reality of the favelas.
American contractors were notified by Welles’ production manager in Brazil, Lynn Shores, via telegrams — which, according to Josafá Veloso in his thesis, were “close to blatant espionage”.
According to the USP researcher, Welles also came into contact with the productions of Cinédia, a pioneering studio in Brazilian cinema, and sought to make a film that would please Brazilians.
“He was very aware that he couldn’t make a top-down film here,” says Veloso. “He didn’t want to make something stereotypical, something whitewashed. There are black bodies sweating, dancing locked up there at UCLA [referring to archive footage that has not yet been made public] , there’s carnival and voodoo. Racism was one of the reasons why the film was embargoed.”
“He wanted to make black Brazilians the protagonists of this episode. When he arrived in Brazil, he didn’t know what film to make. And so, he went after Afro-Brazilian religions.”
Even though Orson Welles directed, after RKO, more than ten films until his death, some analysts have even linked the failure of It’s All True to a kind of “curse” in the filmmaker’s biography.
The story was fueled by Welles himself, who said that a priest, who had gone to his office in Rio to talk about filming in Brazil, suddenly showed discontent and made holes in the script with a pen — it was an anecdote to talk about what he himself called a curse.
A curse that would mean that, after his time in Brazil, several films made by Welles would end up incomplete.
However, researchers and filmmakers such as Catherine Benamou, Josafá Veloso and Laura Godoy have tried to change this perspective and show the American filmmaker’s time in Brazil as a reinvention.
For Catherine Benamou, the unfinished documentary in Latin America marked a turning point in Welles’ career. She points out that the filming methods used in It’s All True, such as Cameflex and 16 mm, had an immediate influence on later productions.
“The realistic portrayal of exteriors in Othello , Mr. Arkadin, Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight owes much to the neorealist style employed in It’s All True. The recorded soundtrack opened up the possibility of creative use of Latin music in Welles’s films,” says the researcher.
Laura Godoy adds that coming to Brazil was the first time Welles left a studio. Afterwards, he had a “practically independent” career, outside of Hollywood.
For Josafá Veloso, the allegations that Welles was “cursed” in Brazil carry prejudice.
“In fact, that changed his career forever. But it changed because he was an artist in conflict with the industry. As autonomous and authorial as he was, that story would never have worked out,” argues the USP historian. “This is where the independent Welles was born. His baptism as an independent filmmaker took place during our Carnival in 1942.”
Veloso adds that the American director also learned, in Brazil, to deal with the unforeseen events that change the core of an artistic work during its production.
Here, Welles’ project in Brazil was honored with the naming of one of the country’s most important film festivals, É Tudo Verdade — focused on documentaries and created in 1996 by critic and journalist Amir Labaki.
“Brazil was not a curse for Orson Welles. It was a blessing. He became Brazilian and fell into samba. It was a wisdom that he took with him for the rest of his life,” adds the historian, who recalls a story told in a recent interview by Oja Kodar, Welles’ longtime companion, to the Brazilian press.
“He never forgot to samba. From (Kodar), we know that, even when he was sad, unable to get financing, with all the difficulties, he remembered Brazil and sambaed when things were boring. Samba never left Welles’s feet.”
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