In 1967, de Andrade was invited by the Italian company Olivetti to produce a documentary on the new Brazilian capital city of BrasĂlia. Constructed during the latter half of the 1950s and founded in 1960, the city was part of an effort to populate Brazil’s vast interior region and was to be the embodiment of democratic urban planning, free from the class divisions and inequalities that characterize so many metropolises. Unsurprisingly, BrasĂlia, Contradições de uma Cidade Nova (BrasĂlia, Contradictions of a New City, 1968) revealed BrasĂlia to be utopic only for the wealthy, replicating the same social problems present in every Brazilian city. (Senses of Cinema)
