Largest document and film collection in Latin America threatened by fire in São Paulo

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The fire broke out late Thursday afternoon (29) in the Cinemateca building complex in the Vila Leopoldina neighborhood.

The building on fire is not the Cinemateca’s headquarters but a building used to store collections and areas for processing film and document collections, a digital photo printing lab, and other administrative, support, and service facilities.

The Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo has the largest collection of “moving pictures” in Latin America and is one of the largest institutions of its kind in the world.

About 17 vehicles of the Fire Brigade moved to the Vila Leopoldina neighborhood, in the west zone of São Paulo, and about 50 personnel were trying tonight to control the fire, which started around 6:04 PM local time (21.04 GMT).

According to firefighters’ spokesman, Major Marcos Palumbo, the flames spread quickly due to the highly flammable materials stored in the premises, such as film tapes, photographs, or copies of movies.

“When we arrived, the fire had unfortunately already spread, because there we have books, records, tapes, a series of materials that catch fire,” the spokesman told the Globo News television network.

According to Palumbo, the heavy fire spread through a building that has about 1,000 square meters, although the entire complex is about 9,000 meters, so firefighters are working intensively to prevent the flames from reaching the adjoining structures.

“We made a barrier to prevent the spread of the fire so that at the tips we can control that fire and extinguish it as soon as possible,” said the spokesman.

He added that, for the moment, it is not known if there are victims and the reasons for the start of the fire, although he explained that witnesses reported that the flames had started through the roof of the building, “where the electrical installations are normally located”.

Threatened by the flames are 70,000 objects, including books, magazines, catalogs, scientific productions, and brochures.

STORAGE

The Cinemateca is the national audiovisual memory of Brazil.

It preserves a large part of the national cinematographic content, and because of that, it houses the greatest diffusion of Brazilian cinema, with more than two thousand rolls of films, which correspond to 30,000 titles among the foreign works produced since 1895.

The institution has already received awards and international recognition as one of the five most important restoration centers in the world.

The library collection consists of approximately 4,700 documents such as censorship certificates, invitations, and also a huge collection with around 3,000 scripts and another 8,000 movie posters, of which 2.600 are related to national cinema.

The center houses over 90,000 films, including some rarities from the beginnings of Brazilian cinema and classics by well-known filmmakers.

In addition, the center also offers television programs such as broadcasts of old soccer matches and recordings about the Brazilian Expeditionary Forces before and after World War II.