The Stade in Hastings was jumping with Brazilian music, food, magic, art and craft workshops at BrasilFest 2017 on Saturday June 10. OcabrazOka, a charity which was set up in January 2017 in Hastings to bring Brazilian culture to the local people presented its first full-scale family festival celebrating three distinct aspects of Brazilian culture, the Brazilian Aboriginal people, the African diaspora in Brazil and carnival. Mauricio Vincenzi and Emmanuel McDonald, film makers, founders of the charity said they wanted to add Brazilian experiences to the many other cultural events which happen in Hastings.
As part of the programme, the Electric Cinema, in Hastings High Street showed a reel of several short films on Sunday June 11 (one take each) which Vincenzi and McDonald produced. It was quite avant-garde and very different from the vibrant carnival extravagance on Saturday. Sadly the audience was almost non-existent. Vincenzi has a special interest in Curta8 (Super8) which is the old method of filming and showed it to the audience, using the machine in the photo. He explained that one of the reasons this way of making films vanished was because developing of these reels stopped as everything went digital. However, as more people were getting interested again in the old method, Kodak decided to follow the trend and now sells the film and will also develop it. The short films that were shown had no digital components though Vincenzi explained that many film makers now combine both.
If anyone is interested in Brazilian culture or wants to know more about Curta8 film making or further information about what OcabrazOka is planning, either email: ocabrazoka@gmail.com or go to facebook.com/Ocabrazoka
Photos: Heidi Foster