British and American television shows frequently deploy rape and sexual assault to juice up characters’ backstories or titillate viewers, but they rarely focus on how one assault impacts multiple people’s lives or how intersectional oppression further traumatizes assault survivors. FQ columnist Caetlin Benson-Allott suggests that this may change in the wake of Michaela Coel’s incendiary series I May Destroy You (BBC One and HBO, 2020), which has answered a need for more artistically ambitious television about black life and for feminist-of-color critiques of rape culture on television. Hailing the series for its formal innovations as well as its generic and political interventions, Benson-Allott argues that I May Destroy You elevates its genre, and television more broadly, by contesting their prior shortcomings.

In an impressionistic, episodic appreciation, Janaína Oliveira reconsiders the legacy of Black Brazilian filmmaker Zózimo Bulbul. She argues that Bulbul’s status as a pioneer for black Brazilian cinema does not reside in historical chronology, but rather in the aesthetic and narrative advances accomplished by his short film, Alma no olho ( Soul in the Eye ), in which he also starred. Having endured almost forty years of neglect by the Brazilian film establishment, Alma no olho is now being taken up again as a reference point by a new generation of Black Brazilian filmmakers.

Ivone Margulies examines the output of Filmes de Plástico, a celebrated independent production company from Contagem, Minas Gerais. Her article focuses on two feature films: Temporada ( Long Way Home , dir. André Novais Oliveira, 2018), and No Coração do Mundo ( In the Heart of the World , dir. Gabriel Martins and Maurilio Martins, 2019.) The essay defines two forms—the portrait and the vista—used to articulate the relationship between individual and a broader social world in the films’ realist aesthetic.

Two recent films made by Guajajara people show how cinema allies with indigenous groups to confront the environmental destruction underway in Brazil. Guardians of the Forest follows a large group of young Guajajara, Awá-Guajá, Ka'apor, and Tupi-Guarani peoples assembled to resist the constant and increasing invasion of their lands by loggers and land grabbers ( grileiros ). Where Guardians makes the devastation visible on screen, depicting a growing concentration of forces on the verge of a violent outbreak, The History of Chants is dedicated to the mysteries of the preserved forest, experienced like the modulations of a chant, the paths of a dream, the breath of a shaman.

In the twentieth century, the Black Brazilian filmmakers who managed to accumulate a substantial body of work were few and far between, with a striking number of Black directors succeeding in making only one or a handful of films. Juliano Gomes examines how this landscape has changed in recent years, prompted by a new generation of film school graduates and reflected in landmark events such as the “Soul in the Eye” program at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2018, in which at least a quarter of the program’s films were made by students. His article focuses on two films representative of these changes: Ilha (2018), whose codirectors Ary Rosa and Glenda Nicácio met in the cinema course at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia, and Travessia (2017), an award-winning student film by Safira Moreira.

This article articulates how two recent Brazilian medium-length films challenge the category of the “hybrid film,” incorporating reenactment to recompose invisible routines of institutionalized oppression. In Seven Years in May , Affonso Uchôa ( Araby; The Hidden Tiger ) uses collaborative methods to render visible the structure of mass incarceration in Minas Gerais. Shot with a group of young men in Contagem, the film is a tryptic where each part employs a different mode of narrative reconstruction. Directed by a group of first-time Guarani-Kaiowá filmmakers, Ava Yvy Vera retells the murder of their leader, Nisio Gomes, by forty masked gunmen in 2011. The film uses reenactment to infiltrate the present with the past, reviving Gomes through the palpability of his absence. In both cases, aesthetic choices disturb the legibility of events, questioning the authoritative inclination of narrative clarity in both fiction and documentary, as well as the glacial category of the hybrid film.

Bacurau is the name of a city in Brazilian hinterland whose inhabitants fight to survive a foreign invasion. The struggle of native populations for the right to remain on their land is a common motif not only in the history of cinema, as in classic Westerns, but also in Brazilian culture and history, In this article, Ikeda proposes that Bacurau ’s originality lies in how it seeks to establish a balance between genre film and political cinema, eschewing the commodified exotic spectacle of Sérgio Rezende’s The Battle of Canudos (1997) and Glauber Rocha’s radical political allegory in Black God, White Devil (1964), in order to offer a more complex commentary on the current Brazilian historical moment.

In this article, Kênia Freitas documents the growing presence of Black filmmakers in Brazil’s independent cinema exhibition circuits and investigates the larger network of art collectives, film clubs, and film festivals that are contributing to the recent racial reconfiguration in Brazilian cinema. Focusing on three new black film series and festivals—Mostra de Cinema Negro Brasileiro (Paraná), Mostra EGBÉ de Cinema Negro (Sergipe), and Negritude Infinita (Ceará)—all situated outside the more traditional Rio/São Paulo axes of national cinema, Freitas’ discussion of these nascent exhibition networks suggests future strategies for structural transformational change.

In this essay, Bruno Guaraná argues that Bacurau presents a cinematic intervention that is twofold: first, into global genre cinema, as it disrupts generic conventions of both the Western and the horror film and relocates the narrative to the margins; and second, into Brazilian cinema—in particular, regarding its depictions of the sertão , or hinterland. Guaraná calls attention to the role played by the film’s narrative and musical soundscape in engineering this audiovisual reeducation.

When Bacurau (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019) was released in Brazil, it was mainly received as a left-wing critique of the rise of the far right in the country’s political landscape. But some critics argued that the feature’s insistence on graphic violence was actually a celebration of barbarism, equating the oppressed villagers to their genocidal oppressors. This article refutes this view, borrowing from the analysis of science-fiction revenge fantasies and also following Foucault’s genealogical perspective. It argues that Bacurau actually reenacts Brazil’s foundational colonial violence through its complex temporality, in order to rediscover the forgotten past of real struggles that remain surreptitiously inserted in all levels of society, perhaps in the hope that new ways of resistance may flourish from its spectatorial experience.

From her 2013 directorial debut Gideon’s Army , on the trials of public defenders, to John Lewis: Good Trouble , her 2020 tribute to the late Congressman, Dawn Porter’s documentaries reveal the scope and scale of American injustice while never capitulating to pessimism. Whether focusing attention on the carceral system, abortion access, or voter suppression, her films suggest that the rights guaranteed by the Constitution are upheld through the collective efforts of an earnest, anonymous many. In this interview, Porter reflects on the appeal of contradictory characters, her objective to “disappear” as a documentarian, and the challenges of completing a film during an international pandemic.