Owner of the title of Brazil’s largest cinema for a few years, Cine Theatro Brasil was built in 1932 at an important intersection in the Center of Belo Horizonte. Heavy and elegant at once, its Art Déco volume was one of the largest buildings in the city. It was followed in the 1950s by two other iconic buildings built in the same intersecction: Banco Lavoura (Álvaro Vital Brazil, 1950) and Banco Mineiro (Oscar Niemeyer, 1953). The building once played an important role in the city's cinema and visual arts programme, and represented a benchmark reference in the planning development of the young capital. In 1936, it housed the first Modernist exhibition in Belo Horizonte, indicating its vocation to the forefront and to experimentation. Several uses have taken place in its rooms facing the corner streets, from a popular restaurant to a barbershop - inaugurated by Juscelino Kubitschek -, leaving impregnated traces and remnants of history in its constructive elements. In a recent conversion of the cinema into a cultural center, a huge ballroom was built above the old roof, which generated a great architectural void between the sloped ceiling of the audience and the slab of the new ballroom. Within this void, the original concrete framework of the roof that once covered the original building has been preserved.

PERFORMANCE