Brazil

My latest short film is screened at the Int. Short Film Festival Sao Paulo and finally I make my first trip to Brazil in late summer 2012. Rio de Janeiro has been on my travel list for a very long time and I spend 10 days there before continuing my trip to Sao Paulo. I rent a room in a pleasant B&B in Santa Teresa with a nice terrace looking over the district of Lapa and the bay of Guanabara.

On weekends Lapa turns into a single party ground with musicians and dancers in the streets, innumerable bars and thousands of people partying through the night until sunrise. I do not get much sleep and once, when I go to bed earlier a rooster wakes me up at 5 a.m. In a city of around 10 million people I tend to find that a bit absurd. I even find that fucker in the street the next day but do not kill him as intended.

Like all tourists I also visit the sugar loaf and the Corcovado with the statue of Jesus. Only there I finally get a grip on the topography of Rio and understand how the city is built and structured.

Travelling through Rio by bus, circumventing innumerable mountains covered with jungle or favelas, it is hard to make out the terrain. The topography of Rio must rank as one of the most beautiful in the world with its green mountains, the Atlantic coast, a huge bay and even a lagoon which is handily placed in the interior behind Ipanema and its famous beach.

Harald Hund