Glauber Rocha, Brazil, 1964, 118 min // $10
Latin American Film Festival of Dallas is proud to present the LAFFD Film Club. Once a month we will show a classic Latin American film.
Glauber Rocha's sophomore feature is a scorched-earth allegory about the blind followers of dead-end ideologies. Somewhere in the Brazilian hinterlands of the 1940s, ranch hand Manoel becomes an outlaw after killing his swindling boss. He pledges allegiance to Sebastião, a self-styled holy man who preaches revolt against rich landowners even as he perpetrates unspeakable acts of violent zealotry against the innocent. While the landowners hire a mercenary to take out Sebastião, Manoel and his wife Rosa join cangaceiros Corisco and Dadá, only to find themselves once more in league with evil, deluded forces. Steeped in history, myth, religion, and politics, and suffused with the feverish intensity of the blistering desert, Black God, White Devil is one of the Cinema Novo movement's most uncompromising statements on current social issues as well as the universal problem of mindless fanaticism.