Reviews (1)
Classic cinema novo or starring sertão, poverty, defiance, and again, as in the thematically similar film Black God, White Devil by Rocha, hypertrophied religious faith, millenarian waiting for salvation indistinguishable from death, through which one must go. A clash of two cultures, a poor village, living only on utopia, against military culture coming from the city and in the service of the latifundists, feeding only on the work of villagers and cynicism. When the rebellion against cynicism is combined with the rebellion against power, this gesture of defiance leads to folk prophecy, predicting suffering on earth as a condition for paradise and thus symbolically embracing death, the only thing left for him. I agree that the socially critical and documentary/engaged theme and partly its approach is complemented by the "Jancsó-like" camera, which combines two levels – the realistic depiction of the social conditions of local village life and cultural conditions of the birth of religious faith with artistic portrayal of the process in which this religious imaginary produces itself and creates its own heroes, who yesterday still breathed and hoped, but today are already just legends, easing the difficult life with one foot in death and thus in salvation (or at least believed so).
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