Alumni Spotlight: Jorge Atalla

Jorge Atalla received his B.A. in economics from The University of Texas in 1991, never guessing that 10 years later he would be accepting a very different accolade, that of Best Director.  His first feature length documentary, In Cane for Life (A Vide em Cana), was invited to screen at 56 film festivals and won 16 Best Documentary Awards.  His second film, Sequestro, would take him on a harrowing seven year journey into the heart of Brazil’s booming kidnapping business. 
For Jorge Atalla, the plan was always to attend university in America.  Born in São Paulo, Brazil, Atalla was already traveling abroad for summer school in New York, Scotland, and Switzerland by the age of thirteen.  Following in his father’s footsteps, a petroleum engineer who graduated from Tulsa University in Oklahoma, Atalla came to the U.S. for his bachelor’s degree in 1987.

 

When Atalla’s father returned home to Brazil after his time at an American university, he did so as Brazil’s first petroleum engineer.  Responsible for building the Cubatão oil refinery, one of the first oil refineries in Brazil, Atalla’s father would later move on to build his own successful business, a family controlled conglomerate of sugar, ethanol, coffee and cement industries.  Atalla came to The University of Texas knowing that his father intended him to get a degree that would prepare him to step into the family business.

Atalla says that after 20 years, he still misses his time at UT and recalls it as an era of riding his bike to class, attending football games, and making friends he has kept for more than two decades.  Though he took a few film courses at UT, Atalla focused on finding a major that would prepare him for his future in business.   “Being the eldest and only son raised in a family agri-business environment,” he explains, “it was hard for me to pursue my dream of becoming a filmmaker at the age of 18. I never even mentioned it to my father at the time.”  In economics, Atalla discovered a field that both fascinated him and satisfied his father’s expectations.  His training in economics would also help Atalla understand Brazil’s complex and, at the time, struggling economy.

After his time in Austin, Atalla traveled the world, living for a time in Spain, studying at La Sorboune in Paris, learning Japanese in Tokyo, and finally settling in Switzerland long enough to earn a master’s in business administration from Business School Lausanne.  Finally, after almost ten years abroad, Atalla returned home to work in the family business.  It was during this time, after splitting a year between work at the family’s sugar and ethanol refinery in the south of Brazil and the family’s cement business in the capital, that Atalla met and married his wife, Ecaterine.

Atalla’s wife encouraged him to pursue the love of film he’d had since he was a child, and together they moved to New York in December of 1998 to enroll Atalla in a one year intensive film program at the New York Film Academy.  His first short film, a graduation project completed a year later, won Atalla his first film award.  A few days after graduation, the inspiration for his first feature length film struck as Atalla wandered into the Angelica Theater for a screening of the Buena Vista Social Club.

As he watched that documentary “about a group of Cuban musicians once famous, but later forgotten by society,” Attalla says, “it made me remember, as a child at our sugar plantations, the hundreds of sugar cane cutters and how hard they worked, an un-documented life. I left the theatre with a fixed idea on the first film I wanted to produce and direct, went to 42nd Street Photo, purchased a camera, a microphone and 50 DVCam tapes, flew back to Brazil and started shooting.”  For the next six months, Atalla followed the sugar cane workers employed by his family’s sugar refinery business, living as a peer, an unknown with a camera recording their unseen lives.  The story captured by his time in the sugar cane fields revealed a resilient group of people, a group Attala describes as “wonderful people, with beautiful hearts and souls, with humble dreams, and with a vision of life much different from most of us.”

After the completion of In Cane for Life, Atalla went back to work at the family business, but the passionate response to the film was only beginning.  Atalla was learning to balance his business career with the whirlwind traveling schedule of an up-and-coming director when the idea for his next film materialized.  At a 2001 film festival in Miami, when Atalla heard of the kidnapping of a very famous Brazilian advertising executive, he knew that his next film would document the growing problem of kidnapping in his hometown of São Paulo.