Arquivo

A long documentary on the preparations of the Imperatriz Leopoldinense Samba School for the Year 2000 parades. The Brazilian director who lives in the U.S., Medeiros Schultz, followed along with all of the preparation process of the samba school: composing and selecting the samba, the design of the costumes and allegories, activities in the workshed, making the costumes, the rehearsals, life for the participants at home and in the samba school and, finally, the victorious parade of the school now twice champion. Fifty hours of material were recorded all told, including a unique recording of the percussion of the school by a surround system. Schultz stated that he wanted not only to make a unique documentary, “but to portray and understand the most unknown of the great samba schools in Rio de Janeiro”. According to journalist and researcher Sérgio Cabral, narrator of the documentary and author of the book “As Escolas de Samba do Rio de Janeiro”, Empress of Carnival is “the best, the most profound and the most complete audiovisual radiograph of a samba school ever carried out in Brazil”.