ABC da Greve
| Director | Leon Hirszman |
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While preparing his film “Eles Não Usam Black-Tie” in 1979, Leon Hirszman – a member of the Brazilian Communist Party and one of the founders of Cinema Novo, Brazil’s New Wave – stopped writing the screenplay to follow the trades union movements calling for a general strike in the cities of Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo and São Caetano do Sul. Fired up by the events, he decided to make a documentary to signal his activism and support, and to participate in a process he considered crucial to oppose the military regime. Hirszman wanted to turn the filmmaking process into a dialectic analysis of what was going on and to make the finished work a tool for combat and a didactic manual for working-class thinking. However, the movie remained unfinished until his death in 1987– it was censored even before being completed, and it wasn’t until 1990 that it was finalised by Adriano Cooper, director of photography and editor at the initiative of the Brazilian Film Library. It’s a film about struggle and emergency, a work shot collectively with handheld cameras by a very small crew.
Federico Rossin
Cinema historian, independent programmer
While preparing his film “Eles Não Usam Black-Tie” in 1979, Leon Hirszman – a member of the Brazilian Communist Party and one of the founders of Cinema Novo, Brazil’s New Wave – stopped writing the screenplay to follow the trades union movements calling for a general strike in the cities of Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo and São Caetano do Sul. Fired up by the events, he decided to make a documentary to signal his activism and support, and to participate in a process he considered crucial to oppose the military regime. Hirszman wanted to turn the filmmaking process into a dialectic analysis of what was going on and to make the finished work a tool for combat and a didactic manual for working-class thinking. However, the movie remained unfinished until his death in 1987– it was censored even before being completed, and it wasn’t until 1990 that it was finalised by Adriano Cooper, director of photography and editor at the initiative of the Brazilian Film Library. It’s a film about struggle and emergency, a work shot collectively with handheld cameras by a very small crew.
Federico Rossin
Cinema historian, independent programmer
