Turning inward: a decidedly Anglophone awards season
It’s deflating to see international cinema sidelined from the BAFTA longlists, in a politically unsettling year when we need international voices to be part of the conversation.
Flores Raras / Reaching for the Moon
A latterday offering from the legendary LC Barreto stable, unfolding the bittersweet love story of Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares and American poet Elizabeth Bishop against the backdrop of the incoming Brazilian dictatorship.
Manas
A 13 year old girl in a remote village in the Amazon tries to escape a cycle of abuse. Developed from 10 years of research, documentary filmmaker Marianna Brennand’s first narrative feature explores unspoken truths and networks of complicity.
The Secret Agent: Where Memory Becomes a Mirror
Through the eyes of an academic on the run, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s acclaimed, quixotic opus honours the irreplaceable, ordinary lives and stories that a corrupt dictatorship and its enforcers snuff out – and the struggle to hold onto integrity, memory and life itself.
Abril Despedaçado / Behind The Sun
One of the earliest feature films from Walter Salles (I’m Still Here), this is a dreamy, parched meditation on the wasteful futility of revenge.
O Último Azul / The Blue Trail
No country does a road movie like Brazil – especially when the open road is the Amazon river.
Terra Em Transe / Entranced Earth
Glauber Rocha’s thundering polemic on the corruption inherent in politics; banned in the early years of Brazil’s dictatorship, it stands as one of his most compelling works.
Bacurau
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s delirious genre-bender is a modern classic, escalating from thoughtful social drama to weird, ultraviolent revenge Western.