Dictator: One Crazy Job

They’ve become the human face of inhuman barbarity. Leaders like Hitler, Idi Amin Dada, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Ceausescu, Bokassa, Muammar Kadhafi, Khomeini, Mussolini and Franco governed their countries completely cut off from reality. These paranoid leaders were driven to abuse their power by the pathology of power itself. Dictators are driven by a relentless, thought-out determination to impose themselves as infallible, all-knowing and all-powerful beings. But they are also men ruled by their caprices, uncontrollable impulses, and reckless fits of frenzy, which paradoxically render them as human as anyone else. The abuses they committed were clearly atrocious, yet some of them were as outlandish as the characters portrayed in the film The Dictator. They sunk to depths worthy of Kafka: so incredibly absurd, they are outrageously funny.

Geisterkatzen (1)

Zero: A Spy Story

Meu Compadre, Zé Ketti

Short musical film paying a tribute to samba composer Zé Ketti, one of the greatest popular artists of Brazilian music. In a jam session, in the late composer's house in Inhaúma, a neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, a group of friends get together to play his music while a "feijoada" (typical Brazilian food with black beans)is being cooked in the kitchen. The samba-players, first-rate samba stars themselves, remember Ketti's great hits in a homage to the man who was best known as "a voz do morro" ("the hill's voice" - but hill as a metaphor for a place where poor people build their shacks in slums, in opposition to city, where middle-class people live in Rio). Among the guests, names of the traditional "samba-school" Portela and ex-partners. Also, the presence of a black hat on an empty chair, represents the composer himself, who died in 1999, after a life of many accomplishments in music, and appearance in three of Dos Santos's films: "Rio, 40 Graus", "Rio Zona Norte" and "Boca de Ouro".