Noted Orson Welles scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum was the opening speaker at the 2015 É Tudo Verdade (It’s All True) documentary film festival in Brazil on April 14.
Rosenbaum was joined by Amir Labaki, founder and director of the É Tudo Verdade festival.
In addition to a discussion of Welles’ unfinished documentary It’s All True and other documentaries, Rosenbaum spoke on the contribution by Welles’ companion Oja Kodar to the late director’s work – a subject Rosenbaum is scheduled to explore in greater depth at a conference at Indiana University on May 1.
The original press release for F For Fake indicated that it was “written by Olga Palinkas”, the original name of Oja Kodar. In fact, the script is partly written by her. The whole Picasso episode was written by her. People don’t know what to do with (Oja), but I know her much better than I knew Welles. I only knew Welles for about an hour, whereas I’ve known her since shortly after Welles died. People are very confused by her as a figure, but she was one of the only women in Welles’ life who became a VERY active collaborator, on many, many projects. Not only did she co-write The Other Side of the Wind too, but the title is hers as well. And I think that, because she’s outside the world of cinema, people are even further confused by her role in a lot of these things. I even discovered on my own, because she didn’t tell me this, but I guessed it and then later had it confirmed by her, that one of the sequences in The Other Side of the Wind was actually directed by her. She did the set designs for a lot of things, because she’s a sculptor and an artist herself.
The festival has posted Rosenbaum’s 96-minute address and question and answer session on its YouTube page. The video can be seen i its entirety below.
The É Tudo Verdade festival, named after Orson Welles’ first documentary, the unfinished It’s All True, ran for 10 days in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
The 1993 documentary It’s All True – Based On An Unfinished Film by Orson Welles and Welles’ 1973 film essay F For Fake were shown during the festival.
Photos taken by the late Chico Albuquerque during the shooting of It’s All True were exhibited during the festival.
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