Dir: Kleber Mendonça Filho | Cast: Wagner Moura, Maria Fernanda Candido, Gabriel Leone, Carlos Francisco, Alice Carvalho, Roberio Diogenes, Hermila Guedes, Igor De Araujo, Italo Martins, Laura Lufesi, Udo Kier, Roney Villela, Isabél Zuaa |
It’s 1977 and Recife, Northeastern Brazil, is plunged into a military dictatorship in this often tense, absurdist social and political thriller from Kleber Mendonça Filho.
But the bizarre elements, one involving a ’severed leg’, (that serves as a metaphor for government’s persecution of the counter culture) another a two-faced cat, never detract from the core: a sober history of torture, mysterious disappearances and corruption that particularly haunted Recife during the era.
Brazilian star Wagner Moura is at the film’s centre. He plays a likeable widowed father called Marcelo, who drives a yellow Beatle, and is attempting to evade police corruption, in all its forms. A riotous, anarchic thread runs through the storyline with Mendonca playing around with tone and theme, never allowing us to accept the ordinary in this colourful and inventive snapshot of the era. @MeredithTaylor
CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | COMPETITION 2025