Chacrinha: O Velho Guerreiro

José Abelardo Barbosa dropped everything while studying medicine and became a radio announcer. Over the years he turned into one of the best known television figures in Brazil, and went behind a character he had created himself: Chacrinha. A loud, gaudy host with no regard for the rules. The film starts with his youth and describes how that character was born and then how it closed in around the man who made it. Andrucha Waddington's film splits in two: Eduardo Sterblitch plays the young Abelardo and Stepan Nercessian plays Chacrinha in his later years. The telling follows the shape of a biography and makes room for the periods of censorship and the struggles behind the screen. For a viewer outside Brazil who does not know Chacrinha it may be hard to grasp how much weight the figure carries there; the film assumes that weight rather than explaining it.