Container #31 Bacurau screening
Hello. Thank you once again for joining us.
Tonight’s Screening:
Bacurau, Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles, 2019, 131m
Bacurau, a small town in the Brazilian sertão, mourns the loss of its matriarch, Carmelita, who lived to be 94. Days later, its inhabitants notice that their community has vanished from most maps. A band of mercenaries (lead by Udo Kier) appear.
A Western, a sci-fi, a siege film, an amalgam of all things b-grade, Bacuaru seems like a radical departure from Kleber Mendonça Filho’s previous films (and set in the outback Badlands of Brazil, rather than the coastal Recife.) Yet it is also a return of Filho’s genre instincts, cut loose from his arthouse tendencies, and still a film that explores history and the intersection of race and class.
“One of the best filmic distillations of that impending 21st-century sense of doom, a concentrated vision of the apocalypse that somehow manages to strike a hopeful note.” The Atlantic
Unrated 18+ and with thanks to SBS Films International Facebook Event
Part of our gradual Kleber Mendonça Filho retrospective.
Attendance:
As with all our Container screenings, admission is free to all members, and membership can be found at our website container.org.au or at the box office counter on the night. Membership ranges from $30 (six months concession) to $100 (annual regular).
Additional Reading (for those who have the time and curiosity):
Our favourite three pieces on Bacurau are an interview with its director Kleber Mendonça Filho in Mubi here, 4Columns with an overview of the film’s immediate political context here and Harper’s Magazine going deep on its relationship to Euclides da Cunha’s journalistic literary work Backlands: The Canudos Campaign (1902) and its relationship to Brazilian geographic and racial politics here.
Upcoming Screenings:
21 November: Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacurau
5 December: Michael Mann’s Black Hat (photograph above)
12 December: Greg Mottola’s Confess, Fletch (trailer below)
Thank you. We look forward to catching you tonight for our final Kleber Mendonça Filho screening with Bacurau. Then in a fortnight we’re screening Michael Mann’s Blackhat in its Australian premiere. From the director of, amongst other things, Heat and the shortly forthcoming Ferrari.