Filmmaker Noilton Nunes is working to recover “The Candle King,” a film he conceived between 1979 and 1982 with theater director José Celso Martinez Corrêa (1937–2023), known as Zé Celso.
The first screening in tribute to the director is scheduled for January 8, 2027, at Estação Botafogo in Rio de Janeiro. According to Noilton, there are plans for screenings in several Brazilian cities in the year Zé Celso would have turned 90.
Running 240 minutes, the film combines theater, cinema and video and received the Kikito for Best Editing at Gramado. The work is connected to the play by Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954), a writer of Brazilian Modernism, which Zé Celso directed in 1967.
Noilton said he spoke with Zé Celso about a screening at Teatro Oficina using several large screens, to show the film’s signs in the places where they were painted and which were later demolished. The source does not give a date for that screening.
