The Instituto Moreira Salles DVD collection is a small one, limited to 5 to 10 releases per year. Among our titles there are Brazilian contemporary and classic films but also some foreign titles. This year we submitted Vinicius de Moraes, um rapaz de família and it is the second year that we submit DVDs of our Brazilian classic releases to Il Cinema Ritrovato DVD Awards. The main reason is to promote these films to a wider audience, who usually do not have access to them. In 2016 but also this year, we are the only Latin American label to be among the finalists and we do hope that this nomination sheds a light not only for Brazilian cinema but also for Latin American film heritage as a whole.

It is an important time for video-distribution, and also a confusing time for many. With the onslaught of new technology, the key word for the last few years has been of course “streaming”, though “piracy” is also a huge issue in a market like Brazil. Home video as we knew it in the 90s and early 00s is practically gone in our country, corroded by online piracy, the slow demise of DVDs and the failure of blu-rays to truly catch on as a new format. Furthermore, Netflix has become part of Brazilian life in such a way as to make consumers actually believe that everything they want to see is – or will be – available on the streaming platform. All of this has made consumers, particularly the young ones, indifferent to buying a film on physical media, or even buying or renting a film on VoD. Somehow, this very particular moment of change today in video-distribution actually inspires us to keep working on the kinds of releases we understand will make a difference. We invest in a niche market that is very much alive in its small numbers, catering to those who still look for a good quality film release on physical media. We also believe that it is in the nature of Instituto Moreira Salles to work with films we feel strongly about getting one of our special editions, from Brazilian and foreign archives, analog or digital, old and contemporary. In a country which has a problematic track record in film preservation and distribution of catalogue titles, our releases also play an important role in how cinema (especially Brazilian) is perceived as a true legacy.

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Barbara Alves Rangel
Instituto Moreira Salles