Antonio das Mortes
(O Dragão da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro)
Screening on Film
Recently Restored
With Maurico Do Valle, Odete Lara, Hugo Carvana.
Brazil, 1969, 35mm, color, 95 min.
Portuguese with English subtitles.
We are honored to host a very rare appearance by Dona Lúcia Rocha, mother of Glauber Rocha and director of Tempo Glauber, the museum in Rio de Janeiro she founded to help preserve and foster awareness of her son’s work. Now 83, Lúcia Rocha continues to devote her extraordinary energies to this task.
Due to concerns about travelling during the current time of crisis in America, Lucia Rocha has, with profound regret, postponed her visit to Boston. We hope to be able to reschedule Lucia Rocha's visit next year in conjunction with a full Glauber Rocha retrospective.
Characterized as “one of the great troublemakers of modern cinema” by the late critic Serge Daney, filmmaker Glauber Rocha was the guiding spirit of the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement and its most prominent—and polemical—theorist and practictioner. He brought to international attention a unique and highly personal vision of the complex problems of Third World culture and the possibility for an authentic cinema freed from the enslaving influence of the “language of foreign films—particularly North American movies.” When he died prematurely in 1981 at the age of 43, Rocha left behind a rich artistic legacy: in addition to ten feature films and numerous shorts (including many Super-8 works still largely unseen), there were novels, paintings, poems, letters, unrealized screenplays, theoretical writings, and voluminous journalistic prose. Part folk epic, part political allegory, Antonio das Mortes—seen here in a newly restored print—is the story of a gunman hired by a feudal landlord to eliminate the leaders of a peasant rebellion and his transformation from hired assassin to rebel leader.
This rarely seen documentary traces the life and work of Lúcia Rocha, mother of the legendary Brazilian director Glauber Rocha.