Brazil’s Cinemateca Brasileira, the largest audiovisual institution in South America, caught fire on Thursday night.
The 6,500 sqm warehouse in the Vila Leopoldina neighbourhood of São Paulo was home to 250,000 rolls of historic Brazilian films, 90,000 titles and over a million documents and film equipment.
It’s not the first time the institution has suffered from such a tragedy. One of its other warehouses also caught fire in 2016, and the Cinemateca had much of its archive damaged in a rain storm which flooded the same warehouse in Vila Leopoldina that caught fire on Thursday.
There were no reported casualties to the fire, as the federal institution had been abandoned for over a year. Its doors were closed last August when the government dismissed all of the Cinemateca’s technical staff and cut all of its funding, a decision which is currently facing a lawsuit by federal prosecutor Gustavo Torres. The lawsuit claims the government caused the institution “financial strangulation and administrative abandonment.” It also claims that pleas from staff went ignored, who requested more resources to protect the cellulose nitrate films in the collection which have previously caused a fire at the institution as they can self-combust when not properly stored and kept.
Many of Brazil’s cinema icons are speaking out against the government’s cuts to the Cinemateca and in support of the institution. Fernanda Montenegro, one of Brazil’s biggest names in cinema and theatre, shared a video on her Instagram account: “From the ashes, we will be reborn […] A country does not exist without its culture being linked to the arts.” Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho also spoke out via social media, as he said on his Twitter account:
Efforts are still underway to assess the extent of damage caused.
Words by Sofia Ferreira Santos
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