André Di Mauro
Di Mauro carries one of the founding surnames of Brazilian cinema. He is the great-nephew of Humberto Mauro, the pioneer whose films are roughly where the national industry begins. For most of his own career, though, he was a television actor inside the Brazilian soap system, and a busy one: the credits run from Eu Prometo in 1983 through Selva de Pedra, Rainha da Sucata, Perigosas Peruas and Xica da Silva, and on to Bicho do Mato, Chamas da Vida, Tricky Business and Vitória. Thirty years of telenovela is a particular training: enormous output, almost no rehearsal, characters that have to register inside a single scene or not at all.
Outside that world, the credit people know is Elite Squad, Jose Padilha's unsentimental film about a Rio police battalion, where he plays Pedro Rodrigues.
The third career is the one he appears to care most about. He works as a director, producer and writer, he wrote a book about Humberto Mauro, and he directed a documentary feature about him that had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 2018. It then travelled: Brasilia, Sao Paulo, Rio, Havana, and in 2019 Rotterdam and the Play-Doc documentary festival, where it took the prize for best film. Not a bad way to settle a family debt.
Movies (1)
TV (9)
Where to start with André Di Mauro
Elite Squad is the entry point and there is no real argument about it. It is the film that made Brazilian action cinema legible to the rest of the world, and it is still hard going in the way it intends to be. His role is not the lead, so treat it as an introduction to the register rather than a showcase for him.
For the actual body of work you have to go to the telenovelas. Lipe in Chamas da Vida is the television role most often named as his best known, Xica da Silva is the most enjoyable of the older ones, a period serial with a considerable appetite, and Vitória is the most recent.
His documentary about Humberto Mauro is not among the credits listed here, which is a pity, since it is the work he built the rest of his life around.