Barren Lives

Along with Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil and Ruy Guerra’s The Guns, Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s impassioned adaptation of the novel by Graciliano Ramos is considered part of the Golden Trilogy of films that announced Cinema Novo to the world. Set in 1940 amidst a drought-stricken sertão of northeastern Brazil, Barren Lives follows a family—Sinhá Vitória (Maria Ribeiro), Fabiano (Átila Iório), their two small boys, and their dog—as they traverse the region’s merciless landscape in search of work, their attempts to eke out any living met only with further hostility and violence by authority figures. Producer Luiz Carlos Barreto, who also served as a cinematographer, used a “naked lens, with no filter,” that embraced blown-out contrasts and transformed austere imagery into something altogether more unusual and immediate, amounting to a flinty portrait of cyclical poverty that, as the film’s opening implores, “no worthy Brazilian can ignore anymore.” Writing in The New York Times in 1969, Vincent Canby said Barren Lives “comes about as close as may be possible to communicating the feeling of such poverty, especially poverty’s small subsidiary horrors.” 4K restoration courtesy of L.C. Barreto Produções Cinematográficas.