AMIA 2020

The first Brazilian sound feature, “Acabaram-se os otários” (No more suckers), produced and directed by Luiz de Barros in 1929, was an inventive and improvised initiative to compete with the Hollywood sound features. 90 years later, it was considered a lost film for many decades. Despite the economic and political crisis in Brazil, a group of professors and students decided to reconstruct the film with no budget, gathering all possible types of documents to end with a 19 minutes version of the original part-talkie feature. This reconstruction was thought of as a guerrilla project, based on extensive research, but very limited resources and poor and few preserved materials. We believe that this is a valuable study case of collaboration between scholars and archivists, especially in the context of very few surviving works from early sound Latin American cinema and diminishing public investments in the culture and heritage fields in Brazil.