INDIE 2008 – World Cinema Festival arrives for the second time in São Paulo, a production between SESC SP and Zeta Filmes. What can we say to a city that is already taken? By buildings, by so many events, and by its millions of people. A place of so many choices, so many options. Is this really the place where one breathes in emptiness? Where to one may flee? Maybe cinema transports us to other places, neither beautiful nor ugly, but other places. A space in which time is suspended, of life outside. Is this the reason why this city is to much in love with the cinema?

So much in love that it is fully able to understand a 72-year-old Japanese gentleman who has made over 100 films. Koji Wakamatsu is his name. Never shown in Brazil – isn’t it incredible to still have something shown here for the first time? Wakamatsu makes his radical and free cinema, speaking of sex and politics in equal measures. INDIE shows six of his films, from the cult pinku eiga films of the 60s and 70s to the important retrieval that he made of the Japanese terrorist movement in his latest film. Cannot be missed.

In this edition Wakamatsu joins a new generation of 31 directors. The tireless cinema, which always has a new director arising at any moment. This is the addiction of cinephiles, to love an art that never tires of being contemporary.

INDIE is an event that started in Belo Horizonte eight years ago. In the text that introduced the catalogue in Minas Gerais and in the graphical identify this year, we talked about the ipe trees, the city, the landscape, and the interferences in this public/urban space. For a moment, the word indie is taking up its own space on the streets.

For a city like São Paulo, an icon of urbanity and of the super busy megalopolis taken up by information and signs, what we may say is that the word INDIE means 35 sessions, 40 films, 10 countries and 6 days to keep life suspended outside and to remind ourselves about being more free and independent.

Francesca Azzi, Eduardo Cerqueira and Daniella Azzi
Zeta Filmes