FIGHT
BY FIGHT THEY CONQUERED THE WORLD
In
“The Gracies and the Birth of Vale Tudo”
is a feature documentary that profiles this larger than life guru. Together
with his brothers, Carlos created free-for-all competitions (Vale Tudo) and
built an army of modern-day warriors.
After almost a century, with 47
black-belts and hundreds of world titles, the Gracie family still fights with
this single collective goal: to prove their techniques are more effective than
any other making them one of the most dominant families of athletes in modern
history.
From Brazil’s gyms to its streets to the beaches of Rio, the film also takes
the viewer behind the scenes and examines the family dynamics of this most
unusual clan. It follows both the progress and the conflict of Brazilian
Jiu-Jitsu's two founding brothers, Carlos and Helio Gracie and the army of
champion fighters and huge global business they would ultimately create. It
tells the personal stories of the most legendary and noteworthy family members:
Carlson, the strong fighter who broke from his family; Rolls, the tragic
hero; Rorion, the ruthless businessman; Royce, the unlikely
evangelist; Rickson, the unbeatable champion and Renzo, the reconciler.
Fascinated by these principles and via
unprecedented access to home movies and family archives, filmmaker Victor Cesar
Bota follows the first family of no-rules fighting from their humble origins on
the streets of Brazil to a worldwide fascination now called Mixed Martial Arts.
In the United States, he discovered most people thought Mixed Martial Arts was
brand new, when actually it had existed in Brazil for more than 70 years and
during all of that time was almost completely dominated by this single family.
“The Gracies and the Birth of Vale Tudo” is a tale of morality, pride and
family tragedy, an unyielding belief in a lifestyle and philosophy that grew to
be a booming global phenomenon.