Many films produced in the state of Pernambuco, Brazil, from the 1990s onwards present aesthetic features associated with the Manguebeat musical genre, especially those directed by the filmmakers who took part in the so-called Árido Movie movement. Music video was a key medium in the interaction of film and music in these films. In this chapter, I will examine musical moments in Pernambucan films as the result of a dialogue between film and music videos. Tensions between fiction and documentary, as well as pop references, will be explored by means of an intermedial method that enables reflections on historical developments and meanings, taking into account the film supports available in a moment of transition between analogue and digital technologies.

Manguebeat exploded in the media as a musical phenomenon in the 1990s, paving the way for its cinematic counterpart, Árido Movie. Two decades had elapsed in Pernambuco, a state located in the northeast of Brazil, without a single feature film being produced. Then, the film Baile perfumado (Perfumed Ball, Paulo Caldas and Lírio Ferreira, 1996) was released, becoming a landmark of the so-called Retomada do Cinema Brasileiro (Brazilian Film Revival), after the crisis in the early 1990s, when President Fernando Collor de Mello's government dismantled Embrafilme, the agency supporting film production and distribution in the country. In a bid to overcome the crisis, the interaction of cinema with other media became a way of getting up to speed with the political and social reality of Brazil.

Both phenomena – Manguebeat and Árido Movie – emerged in the city of Recife, Pernambuco's capital. At origin, both can be understood as a response to the city's problems, as can been gleaned from the manifesto ‘Caranguejos com cérebro’ (Crabs with Brains) (Vargas 2007: 66), launched in 1991 as a press release by Manguebeat member Fred Zero Quatro (from the band Mundo Livre S/A) and supported by several other musicians and artists from Recife. ‘Mangue’, meaning ‘mangrove’, is a feature of Recife's natural landscape and defines the three parts of the manifesto. Part I, ‘Mangue, the Concept’, refers to Recife's ecosystem, which is characterised by a web of rivers and the sea, metaphorically suggesting cultural hybridisation.