Bio:
Alan Brain Delgado is a filmmaker and journalist who directs fiction and documentary films, as well as television series. He is currently based in Washington D.C after spending most of his career filming, editing and directing in Africa and South America. Alan Brain began his career in the film/TV industry as an editor. He worked for prominent Peruvian journalist TV shows and became chief story editor for one of the most important living Peruvian journalists, Cesar Hildebrandt.
Alan Brain also edited television series and feature length films for the production company of renowned Peruvian Hollywood Film Director and Producer Luis Llosa. There, he worked with some of the most talented Peruvian fiction directors and edited more than 500 television series episodes. This intense period as an editor later would be critical to his evolution into filming and directing.
Always looking for new challenges, in 2008, Alan Brain left Peru to become a full-time filmmaker for the United Nation Peacekeeping Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). There, Brain filmed, edited, produced and/or directed news shows and short-length documentaries for the United Nations, which aired on Congolese national television channels. He also filmed, directed and edited several medium length documentaries about urgent issues in the DRC such as human rights, internally displaced persons (IDPs), gender, women’s rights, and child abuse. In his last years in Congo, Alan Brain filmed, directed and edited a series of 4 to 6 minute portrait documentaries exploring the essence of Congolese identity.
Upon returning to Peru in 2014, Alan Brain directed and edited short films, commercials, corporate videos, television series and filmed on assignment for Al Jazeera International in different regions of Peru. Brain directed a five-episode run of a Peruvian TV series called “Acusados” (The Guilty Ones) where he led a crew of more than 40 technicians and 15 actors.
Brain’s most recent project, presently in final stage of production, is a long-length documentary feature film about the golden era of Congolese Rumba music, entitled “The Rumba Kings”. Also in the works, is a documentary film that highlights the contributions of African slaves and their descendants to Peruvian culture, contrasting it with the discrimination that they face today.
An avid writer, Brain is also preparing the script for an upcoming long feature fiction film. Alan Brain is fluent in English, Spanish and French.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).