Son of slain Brazilian film director arrested

AFP/Brasilia

Brazilian police yesterday said they arrested the son of leading film director Eduardo Coutinho on suspicion of stabbing his father to death on Sunday at their home.

The elder Coutinho, who was 80, was killed on Sunday in his Rio home, and his wife was seriously wounded in the attack.

Neighbours reported that their son, Daniel Coutinho, 41, had knocked on their door “babbling incomprehensibly” after the attack, police commissioner Rivaldo Barbosa told Globo’s G1 news portal.

The younger Coutinho, who was known to have been battling mental illness, “is under police guard at hospital as he also tried to kill himself,” a spokesman said.

He underwent surgery for knife wounds sustained during the attack, Rio health authorities said.

The film director’s wife Maria das Dores Coutinho, 62, remained in serious condition in hospital after sustaining stab wounds to the chest and liver, police said. She managed to take refuge in the bathroom during the attack and telephone her other son, Barbosa revealed.

Coutinho was buried in Rio later yesterday.

Among Coutinho’s best known work was his 1967 drama ABC do Amor (The ABC of Love), which he directed with Argentina’s Rodolfo Kuhn. It competed in the 17th Berlin International Film Festival, where it was nominated for a Golden Bear.

Sao Paulo-born Coutinho was widely considered one of Brazil’s finest directors. “It was with sadness that I learned of the tragic death of filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho. Brazil and Brazilian cinema lost their greatest screenwriter,” President Dilma Rousseff tweeted yesterday.

Coutinho associates expressed shock at the news. “We were close friends and I followed his career closely. He was one of the most intelligent directors I ever knew and the best documentary writer Brazil ever had,” fellow film director Caca Diegues said.

The film director Silvio Tendler also expressed shock and sadness, saying Coutinho’s “films and lessons about life will stay in the memory.”

Breaking off law studies at 21 for film and the theatre, Coutinho moved to France, producing his first documentaries in the late 1950s. He honed his art at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies (IDHEC).

Another landmark work was Twenty Years Later - a docudrama about an executed peasant leader that took 20 years to come to fruition after a 1964 military coup forced Coutinho to break off filming in Brazil.

Seventeen years after starting the project, Coutinho returned to interview surviving local community leaders. Last year, he was inducted into the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Coutinho also indicated he planned to make a documentary about popular protests that shook Brazil last June against political corruption and the cost of staging the World Cup and the 2016 Rio Olympics. cdo-cw/jm 1812 03022014