Helena Solberg: The Emerging Woman

The Brazilian filmmaker Helena Solberg (b. 1938) has built a unique filmography featuring an impressive array of themes with aesthetic and political consistency and coherence for nearly sixty years. Her first film, The Interview (A entrevista, 1966), launched one of her keenest interests: grappling with the condition of women in society. It was a pioneering film in various senses, not only in Brazil but worldwide. The Interview foreshadowed themes which would sustain the second wave of feminism, and it is usually regarded as the first Brazilian feminist film. This was followed by the poetic Noon (Meio-dia, 1970). Both convey a strong atmosphere of rebellion and nonconformity against the established powers, no small feat in a country amidst a civilian-military dictatorship. This strengthened Solberg, who was the only woman to participate in the watershed Cinema Novo in Brazil. 

Upon moving to the United States in the early 1970s, and fully living the moment of libertarian effervescence and great demonstrations for equal rights, Solberg became involved in a collective creation with the International Women’s Film Project, which resulted in the seminal trilogy The Emerging Woman (1974), The Double Day (La doble jornada, 1975) and Simply Jenny (Simplemente Jenny, 1977). In the 1980s, she made a series of documentaries for the US network Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which explored the US foreign policy, the local mobilisations against authoritarian regimes in Latin America, and confronting hegemonic perceptions about the US interference in the region. One of them was From the Ashes... Nicaragua Today (1982), which sparked controversy by winning an Emmy while being criticised by influential politicians and journalists as ‘publicity for socialist realism’.

The multiple award-winning Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business (1994) marked Solberg’s return to Brazil, and started a new phase in which she turned her gaze to Brazilian artistic manifestations. Nevertheless, she has never lost sight of how political, economic, and social contexts reverberate in the individual. This became her hallmark permeating her trajectory.

Her first fiction feature, Diary of a Provincial Girl (Vida de menina, 2004), was based on the 1942 book Minha vida de menina by Helena Morley (pen name of Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant), translated by Elizabeth Bishop as The Diary of Helena Morley (1957), the memoirs of a young girl at the end of the nineteenth century as Brazil underwent profound transformation with the end of the monarchy and recent abolition of slavery. The protagonist is another rebellious and defiant character depicted by Solberg.

In her latest documentary film, Jandyra, a Brazilian Tragedy (Meu corpo, minha vida, 2017), the filmmaker returned to the theme of women’s struggle for bodily autonomy discussing abortion in Brazil. As usual, she adopted an explicitly feminist perspective and dealt with female experience in an intersectional approach, intertwining gender, class, race, and national identitity.

For nearly six decades, Helena Solberg has pursued remarkable boldness and commitment in her filmmaking career. Recently, she has been working on two film production projects alongside the development of another two with the film producer David Meyer, her partner in life and cinema. Her work has been celebrated, and shown at the most prestigious film festivals in the world, including, for instance, Rotterdam, Locarno, and Havana, to mention but a few. However, only recently has her filmography received fitting recognition through national and international retrospectives, tributes, restoration of her films, and academic and critical reviews.

Renaming the Cineclub of the Embassy of Brazil in London in honour of Helena Solberg represents part of this major shift in the wake of a welcome revisionist push towards writing a more inclusive cinema history. Solberg’s transnational experience, in addition to her political and feminist activism, ensued, in an unmissable complex and bold oeuvre, mindful of the world ebbs and flows, challenging the film viewer to engage, act and react. May the broad and reinvigorated circulation of her films reverberate, inform, and inspire generations now and in the future.

Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha
Project manager at the Cultural Section of the Embassy of Brazil in London
Film researcher and programmer specialising in Latin American cinema

Helena Solberg is a key figure in Latin American nonfiction cinema. Her early work in the 1970s paved the way for collective, intersectional, and transnational feminist film practices in Latin America and beyond. Thus, naming after her the reopened Cineclub of the Embassy of Brazil in London is a matter of historical justice and a symbol of the paradigm change undergoing in film curation and research.

(Isabel Seguí, Lecturer in Film and Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Aberdeen
specialising in Latin American women’s documentary and collective filmmaking)

The Embassy of Brazil in London Cineclub’s tribute to filmmaker Helena Solberg represents the country’s recognition of one of the greatest film directors in its history. This homage becomes even more meaningful because it is the initiative of an institution linked to the Brazilian State. It is the country itself claiming that we are the land of Solberg, and we are very proud of it.

(Marina Cavalcanti Tedesco, Senior Lecture in Film at Universidade Federal Fluminense
and leading researcher in women in Brazilian film)