Beyond Citizen Kane (1993)

Beyond Citizen Kane (1993) is a British documentary film directed by Simon Hartog, produced by John Ellis, and first broadcast on Channel 4.

It details the dominant position of the Rede Globo media group, the largest in Brazil, and discusses the group's influence, power, and political connections. Globo's president and founder Roberto Marinho was criticised and compared to the fictional newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane, created by Orson Welles for the 1941 film Citizen Kane. According to the documentary, Marinho's media group engages in manipulation of news to influence public opinion.

Rede Globo objected to the film's position and tried to buy Brazilian rights, but Hartog had already made agreements to give non-TV rights to political and cultural groups in Brazil. Rede Globo went to court to prevent a scheduled March 1994 screening at the Rio de Janeiro Modern Art Museum, and gained a court order by which Military Police confiscated movie posters and the copy of the film. It has never been broadcast on TV in Brazil or released in commercial theatres, but was shown illegally during the 1990s in universities and among political groups. In 1995, a court rejected Rede Globo's bid to confiscate a university copy. The film was officially restricted to university screenings.

However, copies sold in Britain reached Brazil in the 1990s and circulated widely there. In addition, since the Internet boom of the early 21st century, the film has been released on sharing networks and had hundreds of thousands of views, as measured on YouTube and Google Video.

Synopsis

The documentary tracks Globo's involvement with and support of the military dictatorship; its illegal partnership of the 1960s with the American group Time Warner (at the time Time-Life); Marinho's political manoeuvrings (which included airing on Jornal Nacional, the network's prime time news program, highlights of a 1989 presidential debate edited in a way as to favour Fernando Collor de Mello); and a controversial deal involving shares of NEC Corporation and government contracts. It features interviews with 21 people, including noted Brazilian politicians and cultural figures, such as politicians Leonel Brizola and Antonio Carlos Magalhães, singer-songwriter Chico Buarque, former Justice Minister Armando Falcão, politician Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who later was elected as president; and former employees Walter Clark and Armando Nogueira.