"O DRAMA DAS SECAS"

ALLEGORIES OF THE HUNGER IN THE DOCUMENTARY FILM OF RODOLFO NANNI

Abstract

This article aims to narrate the trajectory of the documentary film O Drama das Secas, by Rodolfo Nanni. His appearance in mid-1958 represents an important movement for Brazilian cinematography because he articulated in one project the Italian neorealism to a regionalist imagery prefigured on the Northeast of Brazil, in a peculiar aesthetic laboratory. The film also seeks to give visibility to the social problems of this region interpreted according to the political positions of the World Federation Against Hunger and Misery (ASCOFAM), which financed it. The Great Drought that attacked the Northeast that same year is the primordial event recorded by Nanni. The narrative of the documentary is here considered an important report for the study of the Northeast at a critical moment in its history: that of the emergence of a new regional sensitivity that demanded by a strategic redefinition of its economy in the face of the national developmentalist ideas promoted during the Kubitscheck government. The text analyzes how a microclimate of opinion, promoted through the institutional cinema of ASCOFAM, becomes a cultural area of greater social dimension and ends up influencing the events of national life as an important political factor.