10. Céu – Vagarosa
9. Pullovers – Tudo Que Eu Sempre Sonhei
8. Poléxia – A Força do Hábito
7. Numismata – Chorume
6. Ecos Falsos – Quase
5. Zémaria – The Space Ahead
4. Pública – Como Num Filme Sem Um Fim
3. Móveis Coloniais de Acaju – C_mpl_te
2. Banda Gentileza – Banda Gentileza
1. Black Drawing Chalks – Life Is a Big Holiday For Us 
The Time reviewer can't decide if he's going to talk about Lula or the cinematic merits of the film, but I'll let you decide if it's worth watching it. It seems both entertaining and cheesy.It's been that kind of a year for Lula; even in the middle of the worst global economic crisis in 80 years, everything went right for him. His government lowered interest rates to a level not seen in decades, and foreign reserves rose to a record high. Brazil was last into and first out of the recession, and domestic consumption remained high as the gap between rich and poor narrowed at an unprecedented rate. Rio de Janeiro became the first South American city to win the right to host the Olympics. Meanwhile, Lula's opposition flailed aimlessly. His personal popularity regularly exceeded 70%, leading Barack Obama to call him "the man." In perhaps the most remarkable turnaround, and certainly the most ironic, the former economic basket case even offered to lend money to the International Monetary Fund. (See why Brazil survived the economic downturn so well.)
None of this, however, is in Lula, Son of Brazil, the two-hour epic that opens across Latin America's biggest nation on Jan. 1. With a secondary billing that goes "You know the man, but you don't know his story," the film vaults through the episodes that marked Lula's early years and his remarkable rise from poor to powerful.
In a style that owes much to Brazil's famous soap operas, in which every movement, emotion and line drips with melodrama, the film depicts him losing a finger in a lathe accident and then his wife and son in childbirth, before he bounces back to lead the powerful metalworkers' union in historic strikes that challenged the country's military dictatorship.
Everyone knows the vital importance of the Amazon rain forest for our planet, but few are aware that right next door is another endangered ecosystem of great size and considerable importance. The Cerrado is a vast savanna that stretches across two million square kilometers in central Brazil and is about the size of Alaska and California put together. The Cerrado deserves our attention: it is one of the oldest and most diverse tropical ecosystems and is under grave threat because of the country's agricultural boom. The Cerrado has lost 48% of its original vegetation and is disappearing faster than the Amazon rain forest; it may be gone before we realize what we've lost. And its health affects its neighboring biome's health; many large tributaries of the Amazon River originate in the Cerrado.
The Cerrado consists of open grasslands, grasslands mixed with shrubs and small trees, and dry-forest woodlands. The region is much drier than the Amazon, which it borders along the latter's southeastern edge; the Cerrado has a long annual dry season and its plants are drought-tolerant and often fire-adapted. Jaguars, giant anteaters, maned wolves, foxes, pampas deer, tapirs, capybaras, and monkeys live in the Cerrado, as do nearly 200 other mammals, 600 bird species, 220 reptiles, and more than 10,000 plant species (44% endemic, according to Conservation International). The Cerrado is the most biologically diverse savanna on Earth. It is the home of many of Brazil's indigenous peoples, who have been adversely affected by the deforestation, and the location of major cities like Brasília, the country's capital.
Mount Roraima is a pretty remarkable place. It is a tabletop mountain with sheer 400-metre high cliffs on all sides. There is only one 'easy' way up, on a natural staircase-like ramp on the Venezuelan side – to get up any other way takes and experienced rock climber. On the top of the mountain it rains almost every day, washing away most of the nutrients for plants to grow and creating a unique landscape on the bare sandstone surface. This also creates some of the highest waterfalls in the world over the sides (Angel falls is located on a similar tabletop mountain some 130 miles away). Though there are only a few marshes on the mountain where vegetation can grow properly, these contain many species unique to the mountain, including a species of carnivorous pitcher plant.
Some twenty million people live in São Paulo – crammed into a jagged concrete sprawl that stretches unbroken to every horizon. And there is a planet of cultures here - from Lebanese to Japanese, African and native American, to Anglo-Irish and Greek. Their heritage mixes with that of the internal migrants who pour in daily on flat-bed trucks and buses from the Amazon and desert back lands of the North East in search of a new life. Together they produce a unique musical culture that mixes the sounds of the entire world with the rhythms of continental Brazil, fuelling an intensely creative independent music scene. Its sound is played out nightly in an astonishing diversity of venues – chic, neon-lit cocktail lounges, trashy beer bars, art deco theatres, spit and sawdust samba clubs and state of the art concert halls. While art critics favour the Oscar Niemeyer designed Auditório Ibirapuera, musicians hang out at Bar Genesio in Vila Madalena.Megacity Sounds
In a region that is very different, and far less densely populated, than most of Brazil, the exercise of nation-building that has taken place over the last half-century is in full evidence. Nothing is more stereotypically Brazilian than soccer and soap operas, and the Globo network, which provides plenty of each, is often credited (or vilified) for creating modern Brazilian tastes and obsessions.Soccer and soap operas in the Amazon
Rice and beans now supplement the traditional diet of fish and manioc flour, even though they are not typically raised here. The only things that seem not to have made it here are beds (hammocks criss-cross in crowded bedrooms), sofas (seating varies from stools and benches to gorgeous Amazonian hardwood floors that seem out of place amid such poverty) and samba (the locals prefer accordion-based forro).
Earlier this month, Brazilian pop star, composer and producer Carlinhos Brown presided over the launch of the spectacular new International Center For Black Music at the Museu du Ritmo (Rhythm Museum) in his hometown of Salvador, Bahia. The Brazilian megastar, who once remarked that his head was a "museum of rhythms," has spent the last two years quietly laying the foundations for a major international arts and cultural center in his birth city. The new center will be incorporated into the Museu du Ritmo, which first opened in 2007 - a groundbreaking event vitrually ignored outside of Brazil. The museum and concert space are part of the restoration efforts for the Cidade Baixa (Lower City) area that was once Salvador's commercial center and occupies the old Mercado do Ouro (Gold Market) site, now designated as an historic landmark.Carlinhos Brown Launches International Center For Black Music (via braziliansound)
Carlinhos Brown's Museu du Ritmo along with the Center of Black Music will decisively establish Salvador as an international cultural capital of black music. Considering the fact that Bahia is the historical birthplace of modern Brazil through her early history of over 4.5 captive Africans (from different West African and Bantu ethnicities and regions) who drove the Portuguese colonial sugar industry between the 16th - 19th centuries, the country's relatively recent efforts (since 2003) to help bring about racial equality for African descendents through cultural black consciousness celebrations is a real reason to acclaim Salvador as Brazil's 'Capital of Happiness.'
It's good for your sole: Melissa, the hot Brazilian plastic shoemaker, has done it again. Melissa makes eco-friendly shoes that are 100% recyclable. The production process is fair and sustainable and the "plastic" shoes are made via injection molds, of a special material, melflex, a mono-material which can be dissassembled and recycled. The factory has almost (99%) zero-waste, recycling its factory water and waste, and the employees are well-paid. The company supports many social and environmental programmes in Brazil.
She also teams up with very hip designers such as Vivienne Westwood and the Campana Brothers. And now she has got Zaha Hadid, famous international architect to design a pair of rubber shoes. Hadid is controversial both from a design point of view (love her or hate her) and construction-wise--her swimming pool proposal for the 2012 London Olympics is already 3 times over budget and it hasn't been built yet. As for the shoes--they look great. She says "The fluidity of our design combined perfectly with the technology of Melissa's plastic, injecting pieces without closures or seals."
Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil's border with Bolivia.
The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story.
"It's never-ending," says Denise Schaan of the Federal University of Pará in Belém, Brazil, who made many of the new discoveries from planes or by examining Google Earth images. "Every week we find new structures." Some of them are square or rectangular, while others form concentric circles or complex geometric figures such as hexagons and octagons connected by avenues or roads. The researchers describe them all as geoglyphs.
Vanessa Da Mata - Sim (Sony)
It's taken a while for Brazilian singer Vanessa Da Mata's uber-hit, "Boa Sorte"--a duet with Ben Harper--to reach American audiences. The song has dominated Europe for months, not to mention South America; finally we're it's being played on our radio stations. In tow comes the gorgeous album it was released on. A very Jamaican sounding influence spreads itself thickly through the majority. The opening "Vermelho" is rich with bass and keys, never losing the effervescent guitars reminiscent of the psychedelic samba that is her birthright. "Pirraça" hits a deep groove all its own. On the flip, her bossa is strong: "Fugiu Com A Novela" is stunning, delivered with the raspy perfection by this former basketball player and model. With Sim--the appropriately titled "Yes"--Da Mata joins fellow Brazilian singers Ceu and Cibelle evolving her national folk song into new and refreshing directions.
Bebel Gilberto - All In One (Verve)Top 10 Global Albums of 2009
Bebel Gilberto slipped into the American imagination with Tanto Tempo in 2000 and has refused to leave. The efforts that followed--Bebel Gilberto and Momento--felt like extensions of that North American debut; beautiful in their own right, and never without taste, yet safely embedded within the same paradigm. It's not surprising, given that she is the musical and genetic progeny of two great Brazilian singers. I wouldn't say that All In One, her Verve debut, points in a completely new direction. But it certainly surprises.
For years, environmentalists have accused Brazil of putting development ahead of the environment. Unrestrained deforestation, they say, made Brazil a major producer of greenhouse gases.
But in one town, farmers are now replanting native vegetation in a new initiative that could become a model for the rest of the country.
Darci Eichelt cleared and plowed as much land as he could when he first arrived in Lucas do Rio Verde in central Mato Grosso state more than 20 years ago.
Now, a sea of soybeans covers his 6,000 acres, as in all the surrounding farms in Lucas.
Brazil's criminal gangs recruit most of their members in prison and organise many of their activities from there. Comando Vermelho controlled one of the wings that we were in while Amigos dos Amigos and Terceiro Commando (Third Force) were on the other. "They would not last five minutes if they found themselves on the wrong wing," I was told. "What if someone is not in a gang when they are arrested?" I asked. "The authorities just assign them to one in that case."
Viewed from this perspective the 200% increase in the number of pre-trial detainees being held in Brazil that has occurred in the last 10 years is quite alarming. Many of the people being held have only been charged with extremely minor offences – such as shoplifting – but administrative inefficiencies in the conduct of trials means that it is not uncommon for them to spend longer on remand than their final sentence. Many should not even be there at all. The Brazilian judiciary have recently reopened the files in a number of states and found that around 20% of the people currently in prison should be released and a further 30% moved to lower security.
The aging mayor of this crammed jungle city in the heart of the Amazon once handed out chainsaws to cut down the rainforest.Brazil working to reclaim Amazon rainforest
Now he throws around slogans to save it.
That legendary shift is part of a new attitude that's driving a wave of innovation by Brazilian business and government. Those efforts are helping to slash deforestation to its lowest level on record, and have emboldened Brazilian leaders to seek a key role this week at global climate talks in Copenhagen.
``We must add economic value to the forest,'' said Amazonas state Gov. Eduardo Braga, whose eco-subsidies, environmental endowment and plans to sell carbon credits to California have made the area around Manaus a public lab for sustainable forestry.
Simon: Several months ago, you said to me, “I try to put things together that are not supposed to be together.” Does that mean that you are playing a game of opposites?
Tunga: No, the idea of oppositions follows a norm that is, let’s say, old-fashioned, an antiquated way of thinking. In other words, if one thing is opposed to another, the two are not necessarily contradictory. If there is a lesson to be learned in Brazil, it is that in Brazil there are no opposites. What we find is the coexistence of what are conventionally called opposites. Aristotle’s third principle, the law of the excluded middle, dissolves in this social space. Perhaps at the juncture between the two we can find the avant-garde of Brazilian culture. The principle proposed by the Surrealists, that there might be a point within mental space where contradiction was not valid, was formalized by a Brazilian theoretician, Milton da Costa, who proposed a paraconsistent logical model. I believe that there may really exist within the territory of poetry or art production a paraconsistent mode of thinking, where a mode yes and a mode no may each find a space where they are not valid. So we must place ourselves on this ascent, the mode of living in doubt, questioning what seem to us the surest and safest things in our existence. The artist’s discipline consists of this ascesis. To try to understand how a yes and a no can live together, or how a yes and a yes, a no and a no, can live together.
Rio Breaks isn't another surf film. It's a story - about friendship and survival, surfing and life.
Thirteen-year-old Fabio and twelve-year-old Naama are best friends, trying to navigate their way through life in a favela near Arpoador Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Every day, they walk down from the hills to surf at their local break, passed the bullet holes and gunshots that form the fabric of their world and towards the community that's taken root on the sand. Here, they get a glimpse of a life where kids can be kids, and where nothing bad can reach you when you're deep within the source.
How does your Amazon upbringing affect the way you see the issues at stake?The Amazon's crusader, taking on the world
Without doubt, the experience of living in one of the most biologically and culturally diverse regions of the world has affected how I see the world. I see two time frames: forest time and city time. Forest time is slower; things have to be more fully processed; information takes a long time to get there, so people didn't have access to new information. When a new idea arrived, you thought about it, elaborated on it, talked about it for a long time. So this way of thinking, reflecting on and developing ideas, helps me have a sense of the preservation of things, to not make rushed decisions.
Beyond Ipanema - Americas Love Affair with Brazilian Music, is a documentary about the history of America's love affair with Brazilian music, in the words of musicians, producers and journalists. From Bossa Nova to Favela Funk, from Carmen Miranda to Bebel Gilberto, the story of the music that changed the world is about to be told by the ones that lived it.Beyond Ipanema official site
Produced by Béco Dranoff and directed by Guto Barra, the release date, March 2009.
An arty documentary made by musician David Byrne about a personal fascination of his, Candomble, an African cult practiced in urban Brazil. There's little narration, but much music, multiple windows on the screen, and lots of dancing. Think of it as visual anthropology about a vodoo-like spiritual practice which blossoms in Brazil and is now an indigenous religion. For example, there are 7,000 followers of the Sons of Gandhi, a bizarre amalgamation of Gandhi pacificism, Sikh costume, voodoo, Brazil machismo, and Carnival band. The film provides an impressionist view of their exotic celebrations, heavy with music. You have the option of hearing David Byrne's commentary on one track, and this is by far the best way to view the film. His narrative is quirky, personal, informative, and essential, and really should be the default mode of this film. It is one artist interpreting and introducing a new folk art.
Starting a couple of decades ago, the Japan-Brazil flux of immigration turned around, and the children, grandchildren and greatgranchildren of Japanese immigrants in Brazil started going to Japan in search of, let's put it simply and bluntly, money. The experience of course varied greatly, but it was also, most of the time, unexpected for Japanese-Brazilian and Japanese alike. Japan is famously suspicious of foreigners, and Japanese-Brazilian, despite their appearance, are foreigners.In the beginning, the Japanese did not understand why the Japanese-Brazilians played loud music, failed to sort their trash perfectly and did not seem bothered about arriving late to appointments. For the Japanese-Brazilians, their grandparents' or parents' often rose-tinted image of Japan seemed outdated at best, and they felt unwelcome.
"I've been lucky because the Japanese have been kind to me," said Rita Okokama, 40, a Japanese-Brazilian who has been here 18 years and owns Padaria, a small sandwich shop. "But others have faced prejudice. For example, Japanese shop owners will follow around Japanese-Brazilian customers because they think they'll shoplift."
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