Film, TV & Audiovisual Media
Bacurau
Reach: It reaches the Americas and also Europe and/or West/Lusophone Africa.
Brazilian film that brought an image of community resistance, political imagination, and reinvention of the sertão to the international circuit. By combining genre cinema, social critique, and popular aesthetics, it became one of the most recognized recent works of Brazilian cinema outside Brazil.
Released in 2019, Bacurau is a film by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles that blends western, science fiction, political thriller, and Northeastern Brazilian popular imagination to tell the story of a fictional sertão community resisting violent external forces. Starring Sônia Braga, Bárbara Colen, Silvero Pereira, Thomas Aquino, Karine Teles, Udo Kier, and featuring the symbolic presence of Lia de Itamaracá, the work turned a small invented village into an international image of insurgency, collective memory, and defense of territory. Its appearance at Cannes, where it received the Jury Prize in 2019, helped project a less domesticated Brazilian aesthetic onto the global circuit: sun-drenched, rough-edged, political, affective, and crossed by humor, genre filmmaking, and a critique of contemporary colonialism.
Presence Indicators:
- Jury Prize at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, shared with Les Misérables.
- Circulation at international festivals such as Cannes, Toronto, the New York Film Festival, and the BFI London Film Festival.
- Consistent international critical reception, with readings around colonialism, political violence, territory, and community resistance.
- Lasting presence as a recent reference in Brazilian genre cinema, with recognition also at the Grande Prêmio do Cinema Brasileiro.