Bacarau is the first of our Thinking Through Film screenings, in which Kate Nash and Jan Gilles will facilitate informal, relaxed discussions with audience members around films in their social contexts
After the death of her grandmother, Teresa comes home to her matriarchal village in a near-future Brazil to find a succession of sinister events that mobilizes all of its residents.
Set in the near future, Bacarau is a weird and wonderful Western by the director of A Secret Agent. Genre-bending, self-consciously cinematic and fantastically spectacular. It addresses themes of social inequality, hierarchies of (post)colonial power and violence. Exploring how the film thinks about these themes, the screening will be followed by an open-to-all discussion in the upstairs bar. Does Bacarau ask us to reflect on how violence functions on the periphery of contemporary society? Does it offer a fresh, original perspective on neo-imperialism and how it is justified today? Or is the film itself a form of extractivism, exploiting the misery, mystery, and magic, of communities like Bacarau?
Come join us in the upstairs bar after the screening for a relaxed chat about these and other questions.
