Latest news with #Recife
Reuters
7 days ago
- Business
- Reuters
Wartsila bets flexibility key for ethanol power generation in Brazil
SAO PAULO, May 29 (Reuters) - Finland's Wartsila( opens new tab is betting that a more nimble way to generate power with ethanol will prove viable in Brazil where similar efforts by major firms floundered a decade ago. Wartsila announced a partnership in March with a power plant in the northeast Brazilian city of Recife, where a four-megawatt engine will burn ethanol for 4,000 hours during a two-year pilot starting in April 2026. The Finnish company billed its efforts as a world-first trial in generating electricity with an ethanol-powered engine. But similar experiments by Brazilian corporate heavyweights Petrobras ( opens new tab and Vale ( opens new tab sputtered out amid high costs and low uptake, according to people who worked on those projects. Brazil is the world's second-largest producer of ethanol, after the United States, producing the biofuel largely from sugarcane and increasingly from corn. Brazil has used ethanol to power cars for decades, leading to volatile prices affected by sugar and petroleum markets. In 2010, Petrobras teamed up with General Electric, before the U.S. manufacturer split into three separate public companies, to convert a gas turbine at the state-run oil producer's power plant in Juiz De Fora to run on ethanol. "Ethanol was very sexy, everyone gets very hyped about it," a person with knowledge of the project told Reuters on condition of anonymity. The plant returned to running on natural gas shortly after the 1,000-hour test was completed, as higher costs made ethanol untenable as a fuel in the long run, the person added. Petrobras confirmed the turbine in Juiz De Fora now runs on natural gas. Vale Solucoes em Energia (VSE), a startup majority-owned by the mining giant, invested some $600 million in clean energy, including ethanol-powered electricity, VSE's former Chief Executive James Pessoa said in an interview. VSE built smaller ethanol-based generators for electricity which were used in Rio de Janeiro and Amazonas state, Pessoa said, adding that another was built at Brazil's Antarctic research station. VSE was shuttered by 2013. Pessoa said he had not seen any further development since then of ethanol-powered generators like those produced by VSE. "The technology exists," he said, adding that Brazil could have millions of heavy ethanol engines powering the country. "But in practical terms, there are zero (in operation)." Wartsila plans to test ethanol as a fuel for one of its 32M engines, which is larger than the VSE generators but far smaller than the plant converted by Petrobras, seeking efficiency at a more flexible scale. While running a turbine on ethanol 24-7 is more costly than natural gas, those plants cannot provide the flexibility needed by a grid like Brazil's, which is mostly powered by renewables, Jorge Alcaide, Wartsila's managing director in Brazil and head of its energy business in the southern America region, said in an interview. The engine will "follow the wind" and start up quickly when renewable sources like wind and solar fall off, said Alcaide. Wartsila declined to reveal its spending on the pilot. "Thermal power plants in Brazil should be used in the standby model," he said. "We need thermal to be available, it's like insurance."
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Secret Agent' Review: Wagner Moura Tries to Leave History Behind in Kleber Mendonça Filho's Beautifully Remembered Period Thriller
In his 2023 essay film 'Pictures of Ghosts,' a haunted cine-memoir that uses Recife's once-glorious movie palaces as a lens through which to examine — and to mourn — the cultural amnesia of a country so determined to forget itself, Brazilian auteur Kleber Mendonça Filho somewhat counterintuitively observes that 'Fiction films are the best documentaries.' If Mendonça had to make a documentary in order to illustrate that idea, the sober but gripping thriller that it inspired him to shoot next proves the point with gusto. Born from the process of researching 'Pictures of Ghosts' (a fact that becomes rewardingly self-evident over the course of its 158-minute runtime), 'The Secret Agent' recreates 1977 Recife with even more vivid detail than Mendonça's documentary was able to restore his childhood vision of the city through archival video and photographs alone. Focused but sprawling, the director's first true period piece is absolutely teeming with the music, color, and style of the 'Brazilian Miracle' that marked the height of the country's military dictatorship, and yet all of those signifiers — along with most direct evidence of the military dictatorship itself — are sublimated into the movie's pervasive sense of mischief. More from IndieWire 'Militantropos' Review: Another Staggering Ukrainian Documentary About What War Actually Looks Like 'Fuori' Review: Valeria Golino Shines in Mario Martone's Tribute to Maverick Italian Writer Goliarda Sapienza That's the word Mendonça uses to identify the time period in the film's opening title card, and it accurately sets the scene for a story less rooted in the terror of Walter Salles' 'I'm Still Here' than in the wistful barbarity of Wes Anderson's 'The Grand Budapest Hotel.' Of course, those movies both hinge on the tragic poignancy of their stolen pasts, and this one does too — but slowly, and with a much softer approach to the way that memory persists in spite of the gangsters who might work to erase it. Far from the high-octane spy picture that might be suggested by its title (a title that's easy to imagine written in giant letters across the marquee of Recife's São Luiz Cinema), 'The Secret Agent' only bumps into espionage tropes as if by accident, and its protagonist seems to be as confused by them as we are. Mendonça's movie operates at the pace and tenor of a drama in exile, albeit one that's fringed with B-movie fun and stalked by a pair of unscrupulous hitmen. The film's story begins in media res, and while the plot couldn't be easier to follow, it fittingly requires the audience to earn every morsel of the context they'll need to appreciate its power. A middle-aged man who marries the quiet confidence of a cowboy with the 'I don't want any trouble, here' demeanor of an extra who just wants to survive the trigger-happy Western around him, Marcelo could be an anti-military Communist, but he could just as easily be a tech researcher who has personal business in Recife. That duality is at the heart of Wagner Moura's deceptively recessive lead performance — a performance that Mendonça mines for its errant sense of mystery from the movie's opening scene, in which Marcelo smooth talks a dirty cop at a highway gas station where a corpse has been rotting in the sun for several days. 'I'm almost getting used to this shit,' the station owner spits, alarmed at how fast he's adjusted to the reality of doing whatever business he can with a dog-eaten body lying next to the pump. Change comes fast in Mendonça's Brazil, and it's hard to blame people for doing their best to roll with the punches. Marcelo eventually arrives in Recife at the height of Carnival ('91 Dead!' the newspapers exclaim, with plenty more to come), where he moves into an apartment complex run by a feisty 77-year-old woman who shelters dissidents in need of a place to stay as they look for a way out of the country. The space also provides a home to the parents of Marcelo's late wife, and to the young son they shared before she died. It even comes with a covert job of sorts, though we learn very little about the specifics of the counterintelligence network that lands Marcelo a gig at the government office that mints government identification cards. (Certain vagaries are essential to this film about filling in the blanks, while others merely chip away at our understanding of what's at stake.) It's also the building whose archives might contain the only documented proof that his mother — disappeared from the Earth long before this story begins — ever existed in the first place, and Marcelo is determined to find it before he makes a break for the border. Alas, time will be of the essence here, as a bureaucrat who Marcelo crossed up north has dispatched a pair of contract killers to 'shoot a hole into his mouth.' And if they don't get him, Recife's shit-eating chief of police (Roberio Diogenes as Euclides) and his fascist deputies probably will, though he takes a shine to Marcelo that could prove useful in a pinch. Including Marcelo and his kid, all three of the film's rival factions are father-son teams, a choice that highlights Mendonça's gentle emphasis on the relationship between lineage and identity — and the defiant notion that history is as hard to erase as DNA. 'Can I see my blood?' someone asks while in the process of getting it drawn, a simple aside that captures so much of what Marcelo is hoping to accomplish in this story, to say nothing of what has motivated Mendonça, whose mother was a historian, to excavate the memories of his hometown in films like 'Neighboring Sounds' and 'Aquarius.' 'The Secret Agent' doesn't really tie a bow on that motif until the final minutes, which are set within one of the jarringly sterile flash-forwards that are littered across this story, but Mendonça tends to prefer crisp texture over clear point-scoring (as fans of his more fun and anarchic 'Bacurau' could attest), and this vibrant memory palace of a movie isn't in much of a hurry to get to its punchline. That's mostly to its benefit, as the movie — always compelling, but sometimes more sedate than its material demands — is often at its most alive during its detours. A scene featuring an agitated Udo Kier as a bullet-scarred Jewish tailor stands out for the contrast it draws between the permanence of scars and the mutability of the conclusions that people draw from them, while a loaded subplot about a disembodied leg evolves from a literary device to a full-blown Quentin Dupieux gag as Mendonça uses it to kick a hole into the fence between awful facts and urban legends. We also meet a cat with two heads, but I can't pretend to have a clear read on the meaning behind that just yet. The cat-and-mouse chase that's fueling the plot does boil over into a gnarly shootout (Mendonça's approach to gore continues to be a thing of beauty), but, to the potential disappointment of anyone hoping for another hit of that 'Bacurau' high, 'The Secret Agent' is consistently less interested in action than consequence, and less interested in scene than scenery. You can feel the filmmaker's dream-come-true ecstasy at being able to recreate the golden age of Recife's cinemas, which backdrop several key moments and tee up a recurring obsession with 'Jaws.' Ditto the joy he gets from rendering the city's streets in magnificent widescreen, and filling them with punch-buggies, bell-bottoms, and so many great Tropicália-accented songs that the critic sitting next to me spent the entire movie Shazam-ing every scene. I obviously stabbed him to death with my pen at a certain point, but I made sure to steal his phone for reference when the screening was over. That joy is contagious enough to feed into the bittersweet story Mendonça wrote as a conduit for it, and to deepen the ultimate impact of its argument that movies can manufacture a meaningful history of their own — one powerful enough to cut through the erosion of truth, and the official record of a country that might be too ashamed of its own reflection to honestly look itself in the mirror. With 'The Secret Agent,' Mendonça exhumes the past as the basis for a purely fictional story, and in doing so articulates how fiction can be even more valuable as a vehicle for truth than it is as a tool for covering it up. 'The Secret Agent' premiered in Competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film and critical thoughts? to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. Best of IndieWire The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked Every IndieWire TV Review from 2020, Ranked by Grade from Best to Worst
BBC News
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
The Secret Agent review: Kleber Mendonça Filho's 'stylish and vibrant political thriller' could be an Oscars contender
Set in the military dictatorship of 1970s Brazil, this buzzy crime drama, which has premiered in Cannes, "makes up in pulpy excitement what it lacks in subtlety", and "bursts with sex, shoot-outs and sleazy hitmen". One of the biggest sensations of this year's awards season was I'm Still Here, an Oscar-nominated drama about the cruelty of the military dictatorship in 1970s Brazil. Now there's another film with the same subject matter – and it, too, could make a splash when awards season rolls around again. That's not to say that The Secret Agent is quite as sensitive as I'm Still Here, but Kleber Mendonça Filho's stylish and vibrant political thriller makes up in pulpy excitement what it lacks in subtlety. Set in the northeastern city of Recife during the raucous week of carnival celebrations, it bursts with sex and shoot-outs, sleazy hitmen and vintage cars – and it features a severed human leg which is found in the belly of a shark. You'd have to assume that Quentin Tarantino is already the film's number-one fan. Still, for all its brightly coloured, grindhouse flashiness, The Secret Agent is rooted in the real anxieties and tragedies of ordinary citizens. Indeed, its hero isn't a secret agent at all, even if Wagner Moura (Civil War, Narcos) is as tall, dark and handsome as any of cinema's super-spies. He plays the mild-mannered Marcelo, who is first seen driving into Recife in his yellow Volkswagen Beetle. It's about an hour before his identity and back story are revealed – The Secret Agent doesn't go anywhere in a hurry – but we eventually learn that he is a widowed academic who objected to a government grandee's attempts to steal his patented research. A big mistake. Marcelo now plans to reunite with his young son, who has been living with his in-laws, and to obtain the documents he needs to leave the country. In the meantime, he works undercover in a public records office, where he hopes to find even a shred of official evidence of his late mother's existence, and he stays in a dissidents' safe house overseen by a wonderfully chatty seventy-something mother hen (Tânia Maria). Even before he reaches Recife, Marcelo happens upon a corpse on a petrol station forecourt, which no one has got around to removing, so he isn't naïve about life in what an opening caption waspishly calls "a period of great mischief". But he is shocked when he hears that his old adversary has hired two assassins to track him down, and he is appalled by the amorality of the local police chief (Robério Diógenes). Filho and his cast have a gift for creating characters who are either movingly honourable or grotesquely evil. The police chief falls into the latter category. When he reads a newspaper headline stating that 91 people have died during the carnival, he cheerily bets that the total will soon reach triple figures. Despite all the danger and corruption in the humid air, Marcelo has an amused tourist's eye for Recife's eccentric goings on. He laughs in disbelief at a cat with two faces, at his son's obsession with seeing Jaws at the cinema, at the number of people having sex in public places, and at a surreal urban legend about the aforementioned severed leg hopping back to life and kicking the men in a cruising ground. For some viewers, The Secret Agent will have a few of these humorous detours too many. Running at more than two-and-a-half hours, it rambles here and there, hanging out with the numerous characters who dream of escaping from Brazil, like the patrons of Rick's Café in Casablanca. More like this:• Revenge thriller is favourite for top Cannes prize• Gay romance The History of Sound is 'too polite'• The 'dazzling centre' of Wes Anderson's new film But one of the film's key themes is the question of what is remembered and what is forgotten, and Filho, who grew up in Recife, seems intent on putting all sorts of quirky details on celluloid lest they be erased forever. As well as imbuing his hardboiled espionage yarn with richness and comedy, these lovingly realised period details add to the quiet melancholy that Moura radiates: one way or another, Marcelo won't be in Brazil to enjoy these sights for much longer. Anyway, just when The Secret Agent seems to be drifting too far from its central plot, it jolts back into focus, as the hitmen dump a body off a bridge, or an enigmatic contact promises to forge Marcelo's passport. An expertly choreographed chase through the city streets makes for a superb, bloody climax, but, as in I'm Still Here, there are still haunting questions to be answered and mysteries to be solved. For one thing, whose leg was that in the shark's belly, anyway? ★★★★☆ -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Daily Mail
13-05-2025
- Daily Mail
Horrifying moment police officer 'shoots man after accusing him of looking at his girlfriend'
This is the alarming moment that a jealous police officer allegedly shot a man because he had 'looked' at his girlfriend. Brazilian police chief Luiz Alberto Braga de Queiroz has been suspended for 120 days following an altercation which saw street vendor Emmanuel Apory hospitalised. Harrowing CCTV footage shows the off-duty cop giving Apory a push before wagging his finger in his face. Apory then responds by lashing out and punching Queiroz, causing him to stumble backwards. But a flash is then seen and Apory falls to the ground. He could be seen picking himself up and stumbling around before the end of the footage, while the officer reportedly fled in an official police vehicle. Witnesses have claimed the police chief was furious because Apory had 'looked' at the woman he was with. The confrontation between the two, which happened last Monday on the Fernando de Noronha archipelago, ended with Apory getting shot in the leg with a revolver and subsequently taken to a local hospital. He was flown to a larger facility in Recife on Monday afternoon after Queiroz had already left the island, and is now stable after undergoing surgery. Apory's mother told Brazilian media that her son had 'met the woman' two days before at the gym. 'When he got to the venue on Sunday, she was with the police chief, but he avoided greeting her to prevent any kind of jealousy,' she said. 'The thing is, on Saturday night, she'd been with one of his friends at a party. So I think the officer assumed it was my son.' In a video sent to TV Globo, Apory denied having harassed Queiroz's companion, adding: 'At no point did I say anything to her, or to him. I saw, from the beginning, that she was accompanied. 'I was already heading home. I was surprised when he approached me and turned me towards the tree.' Brazilian media also suggested the woman at the centre of the altercation was Thamires Cavalcanti, a nutritionist who works in Recife. Civil Police have now opened an investigation into the incident, and Queiroz's weapon has been confiscated while the probe is ongoing. The Association of Delegates of the State of Pernambuco (Adepe) have defended Queiroz, saying he acted in 'self-defense, in the face of unjust aggressions'. They also claimed he identified himself as a police officer prior to the confrontation and made Apory aware he was carrying a firearm. Adepe claimed that Apory tried to disarm him through physical attacks, which Queiroz responded to with a single shot to the leg. They said the location of the wound 'demonstrates the technical preparation and emotional balance of the police officer, who acted to neutralize the threat with the least possible damage, preventing the weapon from being stolen.' Apory's defence lawyers said they were surprised Queiroz had not been arrested and said the incident 'upset the island's population, who were aware of the victim's peaceful nature'.
