Pra frente Brasil
Brazil,
1982, 110 min
Shown in 1983
CREDITS
- dir
-
Roberto Farias
- prod
-
Rogerio Faria
- scr
-
Roberto Farias
- cam
-
Dib Lufti, Francisco Balbino
- editor
-
Roberto Farias, Mauro Farias
- cast
-
Antonio Fagundes, Reginaldo Farias, Natalia do Vale, Elisabeth Savalla, Carlos Zara, Claudio Marzo
-
COMMENTS
Roberto Farias in person.
The assurances for history may well be that while the Allies won the military victory, it was Hitler who triumphed. Forward Brazil is another film to add credence to that view, a study in political paranoia and the adjustments that have been made to life within a community where fixed and observable rules no longer operate. This isn’t Nazi Germany of the 1930s but Brazil in the early 1970s, and Roberto Farias draws a remarkably convincing and detailed picture of life in a society where people constantly have to adjust to the unexpected, where people disappear without explanation or trace, where family is drawn closer but the limits of friendships are put to the test, where phones are tapped, where surveillance is regarded as inevitable. It is not surprising that this film was banned in Brazil, that it lost its director his position as head of Embrafilme, the Government film agency, for Farias weaves suspicion and distrust into the structure of his film. This isn’t Costa-Gavras: it is life lived at a more mundane level, and only at the end, when the family of a man mysteriously disappears (into the torture-chambers of right-wing terrorists, with support in high places) does the film slide into the more conventional world of the thriller with its kidnappings, car chases and shoot-outs. Until then it has been something altogether more persuasively powerful.
—Richard Whitehall
FACTOID #75
Italian screen siren and ’60s sex symbol Sophia Loren appeared in two films screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival: Ettore Scola’s A Special Day in 1977 and Francesco Rosi’s More Than a Miracle in 1981.
