À la recherche de "Orfeu Negro"
René Letzgus, Bernard Tournois
2005 - 85 min - DV Cam - Couleur - France

1959, and a thunderclap sounds in the sky over Cannes. A virtually unknown filmmaker, Marcel Camus wins the Palme d’Or with "Orfeu Negro" after collecting the Oscar for best foreign film.
Forty-five years later, what has become of the myth of Orpheus and Euridyce, transposed to Brazil by Vinicius de Moraes?
Carlos Diegues, author of a new version of Orpheus in 1999, notes: “The slightly facile romanticism of Camus’ film has nothing to do with Brazilian reality. Today in the favelas, it’s drug traffickers who make the laws.”
Faced with this dreadful reality, Marcel Camus, because of Vinicius de Moraes’ play no doubt, has fully understood the place music has in the hearts of all Brazilians, and particularly the poorest among them. This is confirmed to us by Gilberto Gil, that great musician and current Culture Minister, for whom music corresponds to what we are— a multi-ethnic society, one which owes it to itself to invent a new world: "Might he be the new Orpheus?"
It is by tackling modern daily reality that we are setting out "Looking for Orféu Négro", through the two musical genres of the Bossa Nova and the Samba. We take up the intentions of Vinicius de Moraes for whom the myth of Orpheus, the legacy of Greece, is an integral part of the Brazilian nation.