The city of Rio de Janeiro lies on the western shore of Guanabara Bay, the location of Murilo Salles’s hymn to working class toil, A Bay (Uma baía). Salles excelled as cinematographer in such Brazilian film classics as Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands and has directed both fiction and documentaries, winning a Silver Dove in Leipzig in 1979 for These Are the Weapons. His documentary establishes its own pace in an observational style that is more reminiscent of Frederick Wiseman than the brisk Isle of Flowers (Ilha das Flores) by Jorge Furtado. It is making its world premiere at Dok Leipzig.
In the land of rhythmic samba, Salles opts for an adagio, and its slow, somber notes are used to illustrate a subsistence economy: a horse’s hooves on the pavement, a fishing boat gliding on the water, the wailing horn of a distant ship. The camera often focuses on hands that work, foraging for crabs among the mangroves, scraping mussels under a bridge pylon, mending fishing nets, or braiding human hair. The result, perhaps intentional in a Brechtian sense, is that we are kept from connecting to the person behind those repetitive movements. At other times the camera’s focus adds significance, as in the closeup of the claws of a crab mirroring the gnarly hands that catch it.
The soundscape combines subtle electronic music with ambient recordings: the metallic sounds of the shipyards, the cacophony of Rio’s streets, or the blissful quiet of oars rowing along the water. Salles explains he wants to break with “traditional oral cinema” and propose a “radical acoustic” soundtrack. That he does, sometimes at exasperating length. The dialog in some of the film’s episodes is sparse, only interrupted by bursts of propaganda from radios and televisions, be they evangelical exhortations, political propaganda, or sentimental soap operas. At times the message becomes glaringly obvious, as in a shrill voice-over by an American academic extolling the design of Coca-Cola bottles, or a remix of the Beatles’ Carry That Weight while a horse strains to pull a loaded wagon. The locations contrast the quiet beauty of a sunrise over the Guanabara Bay seen from a fishing vessel to the sterile modernity of a bus terminal or a shopping center, with anonymous passengers or shoppers walking by. Long sequences of a man riding a bicycle or a horse trudging along take us from one neighborhood to another on the shores of the Bay as we observe the social inequalities of present-day Brazil.
The cumulative effect is a hymn to the resilience of the people who find their means of modest survival in the unseen underbelly of the Brazilian “economic miracle” often touted by its leaders. There are oblique references to Brazil’s history of deposing democratically elected leaders, such as João Goulart by military coup in the 60s, and Dilma Rousseff by impeachment in 2016. Current president Jair Bolsonaro is heard shouting threats during his presidential campaign, but those snippets become background noise that the film’s characters absorb with the same indifference as when they watch a telenovela, the mass-produced and ubiquitous Brazilian TV soap operas.
The documentary was shot over a two-year period, from 2016 to 2018, but it is timeless in its essence, as we see how little has changed in the grinding routines of the working class. The credits acknowledge the collaboration of labor unions and identify the people who gave access to a minimalist film crew that is never intrusive, giving the viewer access to the hidden travails of the people living near Guanabara Bay.
Salles has previously portrayed the struggles of street children, as in How Angels are born (Como nascem os anjos). Here he turns away from the tourist attractions Rio has to offer and forces us to face the daily struggles of a population left to rely on their own creativity to stay alive. For that alone, A Bay has achieved its purpose.
Director and Producer: Murilo Salles
Script: Murilo Salles, Itauna Coquet, Eva Randolph
Cinematography: Leo Bittancourt, Fabricio Motta
Editing: Eva Randolph
Music: João Jabace, Sarah Lelièvre
Sound: Felipe Luz, Fabricio Motta, Heber Braga Fernandes
Production companies: Cinema Brasil Digital (Brazil)
World sales: hello@morethan–films.com
Venue: DOK Leipzig (World Premiere)
In Portuguese
109 minutes
