Kleber Mendonça Filho delivers a stinging portrait of life for an academic on the run in 1970s dictator-ruled Brazil.
Kleber Mendonça Filho navigates Brazil’s painful past to paint a loving portrayal of a place and its people, in this slow burning and hugely entertaining political thriller. It’s Carnival week, 1977, in dictatorship-ruled Brazil. Marcelo, a widower on the run arrives in Recife, hoping to reunite with his young son and flee the country. He finds refuge in a resistance commune run by a charismatic 70-year-old woman, but chaos soon catches up with him. Corrupt forces from his previous life are on his tail and he faces further duplicity in the city – his escape trickier with each turn. Combining political statement with light-hearted sentiment, Bacurau and Aquarius writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s novelistic feature revels in playful genre-bending detours – including a gleefully deranged B-movie inspired sequence – and soulful emotions to deliver a sweaty, sun-drenched and masterfully acted ride that is always grounded in love: for Brazil and for cinema.
