Twenty Years Later

In 1962, rural workers were organizing themselves to fight for their rights – usurped by landowners in northeastern Brazil since colonial times – when their leader João Pedro Teixeira was murdered in an ambush. Eduardo Coutinho begins a fiction feature based on his biography, casting his wife, Elizabeth, their children and other militant workers, radicalizing Cinema Novo’s premises: the intended alliance between engaged filmmakers and the people is finally happening, after several attempts to allegorize popular rebellion. In March 1964,a military coup breaks out, interrupting the film and shattering the lives of the actors, who went to jail or escaped to live in hiding. In 1981, with the dictatorship still in place, Coutinho returns to the region to build an essay film that blends together the unfinished material and reencounters with the cast, interviews and reenactments. The past is still present: every scene is troubled by fear, repression, trauma. But this haunted present can still promise a future: João Pedro’s son is too young to remember his father, but he is the one who rebuilds the monument to the leader after successive attempts to destroy it. The history of the film is our history: a land where every attempt to build a future for those who never had one ends up being massacred by the same forces from the past, while some of those who resist still try to remember, keep up the fight, and invent a history yet to happen. (Viennale)