♬ “If it’s nothing like divine, and I don’t believe it is, the act of creating leaves you very close to a kind of transcendence”, argues Aldir Blanc, an atheist, when talking about the experience of being a popular composer, in a speech heard almost at the end of the documentary “Aldir Blanc – Response to time”, an attraction at the Rio 2026 Festival, with sessions scheduled for today and tomorrow, October 4th and 5th.
If there is something that stands out on the screen and in the script at the end of the hour and a half of the film directed and scripted by Marcus Fernando and Hugo Sukman, it is the transcendence of Aldir Blanc Mendes (September 2, 1946 – May 4, 2020) as a composer of Brazilian popular music, an excellent lyricist of melodies created by João Bosco, Guinga, Moacyr Luz and Cristovão Bastos, to name only the most frequent and fundamental partners.
A documentary with an (appropriate) conventional format, “Aldir Blanc – Response to time” gives voice to Aldir himself by profiling the composer through speeches and archive images that reveal the behind-the-scenes creation of the Rio bard, Vasco “since he was a little boy”, a time when, from 1956 onwards, at the age of ten, he became practically enthusiastic about masturbation. By the way, one of the naughtiest scenes in the documentary is the one that captures Aldir showing the “wank album” to his grandson Vinicius.
Before proposing a dive into the composer's creative universe, the script traces the biographical profile of Aldir Blanc, a doctor with a postgraduate degree in Psychiatry who abandoned his profession and faith in God in 1974 after witnessing, as desperate as he was powerless, the death of his newborn twin daughters, Maria and Alexandra, the latter with a lot of agony, blood and suffering.
For Aldir, who had always harbored the guilt of having left his own mother with permanent physical and mental injuries when he came into the world during a complicated birth that lasted more than a day, the solution was to dedicate himself entirely to music. At that moment, to the music he made in the 1970s with João Bosco, the poet's first fundamental partner. The only miracle that the atheist Aldir recognized was the synchrony of his and Bosco's ideas in the art of making music.
Retracing the composer's path to music, the documentary opens the door to the lyricist's creation to try to unveil Aldir Blanc's ability to create imagistic, unexpected and unusual verses that chronicled urban Brazil from the artist's microcosm, located in the North Zone of the city of Rio de Janeiro (RJ).
Aldir was born in Estácio, moved at the age of three to Vila Isabel – the neighborhood of Noel Rosa (1910 – 1937), a poor composer, urban chronicler of the times when Aldir didn't even exist – and settled in the Tijuca region. There, he lived between the house – where he usually wrote his lyrics in bed, turned on his side – and the bars. "Boteco is a temple! It's a living tradition in Rio de Janeiro", he characterizes.
For a lyricist who claims to have awakened his desire to be a composer in 1965 after seeing and hearing Elis Regina (1945 – 1982) defend “Arrastão” (Edu Lobo and Vinicius de Moraes) at a song festival, the transcendence of the creation began to materialize in 1972, the year in which the singer recorded “Bala com bala”, an artillery shot by Bosco and Aldir, a duo of composers revealed that same year of 1972.
“Bala com bala” was the first of almost 30 songs by Aldir Blanc immortalized in the voice of Elis Regina, as the composer proudly states in a speech heard in the film. Other songs and performers would come. “I work on lyrics for the music given to me and I don’t change a note”, he highlights, in another line reproduced in the film.
As the documentary “Aldir Blanc – Response to time” progresses, it becomes evident on the screen how sacred the composer considered the moment of creation. “At that time, at that moment, no one can do more than me”, says the composer.
With an aloof and sometimes somber temperament, the Rio bard seemed to become less clouded in the moments he shared with his grandchildren, with his partner Mari Lúcia de Sá Freire – with whom he maintained a dependent relationship detailed in another documentary about Aldir Blanc presented at the Rio 2026 Festival, “Fui Olhar Você Dorme”, a film by Anna Azevedo – and in the sacred temple of pubs.
And, yes, the best response given by Aldir Blanc to time – even though, at the end of the film, he himself demystifies the poetry of the 1998 bolero that the documentary by Marcus Fernando and Hugo Sukman is titled – was to have survived death from Covid, in March 2020, at the age of 73.
