• Tweeter
  • republish

Barbara Colen plays the role of Teresa in "Bacurau". Victor Jucá

After Aquarius , selected at Cannes in 2016, Kleber Mendonça Filho signs, with Juliano Dornelles, Bacurau , a sadly prophetic dystopia, awarded by the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival 2019.

The new film by Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho and his accomplice Juliano Dornelles will be released this Wednesday, September 25 th. Bacurau is a dive into the hardness of contemporary Brazil. A work that is both disturbing and visionary.

► To read also: Cannes Film Festival: interview with Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles

From an anticipatory scenario, conceived well before the election of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, the film is surprisingly echoing the Brazilian president's reactionary ideas that threaten life and nature.

A band of American mercenaries serving unscrupulous politicians has the mission to remove a village and its inhabitants from the map of the world. The most sordid, and yet the most up-to-date, financial speculation is still going on, which is bloody in Brazil's remote areas.

Through this baroque and ultra-lucid political fable, Bacurau places himself at the scale of the globalized, technological and predatory economy, by measuring the distance that distances him from his underprivileged. This is why Mendonca and Dornelles have chosen the Sertão, a semi-desert territory traversing from top to bottom the Northeast of Brazil, their region of origin, to attach us to its inhabitants, pushed to the collective self-subsistence.

Exploring their forged characters in the imprint of a culture of tradition, powerful and surviving, the story takes us to the heart of their fight. To do this, the script relies on a few characters to highlight the beliefs and the way of life of the small community of Bacurau, a village abandoned and threatened with extinction.

Certainly the western rule of " good against bad guys " is running at full speed. But the feature exceeds the credo of the genre film to project us forcefully into our own anxieties and ask us, like the great French critic of the late twentieth century Serge Daney, also clairvoyant: " The world is- it still habitable? ".

Bacurau , Brazil / France, 2019, 2:12
with Udo Kier, Sônia Braga, Jonny Mars.