In the northeastern region of Brazil, during the 16th and 17th centuries, a group of enslaved individuals from a sugarcane plantation plan a escape to the Palmares Quilombo, a community of escaped Black slaves located in the Serra da Barriga. Among them is a young man named Ganga Zumba (Antonio Pitanga), who would later become the leader of that revolutionary republic, the first of its kind in all of the Americas.Read More »
Cristovam, a native from the brazilian hinterland, works in a milk factory in a former Austrian colony in Brazil. He feels lonely, ostracized by cultural and ethnic differences. One day, he discovers an abandoned house filled with objects that remind him of his origins. He slowly settles in this house. Curiously, more objects start to appear without explanation, as if the place was « alive ».Read More »
Directed by Cacá Diegues and released in 1966, it also has the suggestive subtitle of The adventures and misadventures of Luzia and her three friends from far away. Announcing, in general lines, the film’s structure: Luzia [Anecy Rocha] left the Northeast and made her way to Rio de Janeiro in order to find her fiancé, Jasão [Leonardo Villar]. When she arrived at her destination, she received help from Calunga [Antônio Pitanga], who represents the stereotyped figure of the “malandro” [thug], besides from his activity almost leading the story events. Shortly, Luzia found Jasão and noticed he had become a famous outlaw wanted by Rio police. Their paths from this moment on lead to tragic implications, being both victims of the big city’s urban violence.Read More »
Rocha’s first film, a denunciation of exploitation and the superstition that helps maintain it; an exploration of ‘macumba’, the mixture of Christianity and African tribal religion whose superstition aids the successful subjugation and exploitation of the fishermen in the Bahia province.
Review from NY Times:
LEAD: ”BARRAVENTO” (”The Turning Wind”), opening today at the Public Theater, is the first feature by the highly regarded Brazilian director Glauber Rocha, who died at the age of 42 in 1981. The film, made in 1961, is about the efforts of Firmino, part revolutionary, part devil, to free the fishermen in his nativeRead More »
Four Third-World Christs try to stop the American industrialist John Brahms in Glauber Rocha’s experimental film inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s murder.
The day that Pier Paolo Pasolini was killed, Glauber Rocha decided to make this film about the life of Christ in the Third World. Starting from a dialectical synthesis between capitalism and socialism, and a search of interracial relationships in Brazil, Rocha created a work of religious and prophetic tone that results in a kind of bewilderment contemplative, now lyrical, now frantic, soaked in a new messianism. In his last film, the director proposed a tune of sounds and images that build a picture of Brazil and a portrait of himself.Read More »
The last theatrical film by Marcel Camus based on the identically named novel by Jorge Amado. Set in Bahia, the film presents three interconnected stories set amongst prostitutes, cardsharpers, pimps, drunks and homeless Don Juans and Messalinas in the teeming life of a tropical port.Read More »
Quote:
The film does not have a story. There are three characters and violent action. I was interested in making a technical experiment, concernig the problem of the resistance of the duration of the cinematographic take. There, we can see how the technique interferes in the cinematographic process. I decided to make a film in which each take would have the length of a chassis, and study the almost elimination of the editing when there is a verbal action and a psychological action in the same take. – Glauber RochaRead More »