Dedicated to resisting the dominance of Hollywood, finding a truly Brazilian cinematic style and exposing the unexplored lives of real Brazilians in the favelas ( slums ) and the sertao ( drought-parched backlands ), Cinema Novo filmmakers were possessed by a cinematic fever.
12.
With support from Marshal Candido Rondon _ a pioneer who wired Brazil for the telegraph, took Teddy Roosevelt into the sertao for big game hunting and headed the country's first Indian protection agency _ the brothers founded Brazil's first Indian reservation in 1961, the Xingu Indigenous National Park.
13.
He often identified with the sertao, the vast stretch of arid backlands in the Brazilian northeast known for hardening its inhabitants . " Dry like a cactus, " was how Furtado described himself, even though he attended law school in playful Rio de Janeiro and made that city his home in Brazil.
14.
When Rosa, a doctor-turned-diplomat-turned novelist, came to the ranch in the late 1940s to do some literary research for a collection of short stories, Nardy became his guide, accompanying him on horseback and regaling him with stories of the old days in the strife-torn upland plains known as the sertao, the Brazilian version of the Wild West.
15.
But Rosa's 1956 masterpiece, " Grande Sertao : Veredas, " relied so heavily on a stream-of-consciousness narration, with convoluted stories embedded within convoluted stories, and used so many made-up words that more than a few college graduates found what one breathless critic called " the greatest literary adventure since Ulysses " every bit as difficult to get through.
