This morning Joseph Horowitz sent me an article in The New York Times about who actually does a dictatorship's dirty work — not fanatics, but the mediocre and the passed-over. I have already seen this movie. I filmed its first act, on Super 8, in the streets of Buenos Aires in 1974.

Haroldo Costa, who died in December at ninety-five, spent his life arguing that the samba school is the book of a country that reads little — and that the singer who carries its song is a griot, the keeper of a people's history. A tribute, built from his own voice on film.

Reads as the lede a Wix preview card would show. The phrase "whose marble built much of civic America" is the hook — concrete, immediate, no jargon. The closing — "to the Apuan town from which they sailed" — gives it emotional shape without being florid.