Four Days in September

Four years after the United States-backed coup d’etat in Brazil, freedom of speech was suspended and dissident intellectuals were rounded up for torture, death, and deportation. Bruno Barreto’s Oscar-nominated political thriller chronicles one of the most radical acts born of this period, in which a group of young revolutionaries abducted the United States Ambassador to Brazil, Charles Elbrick, and held him in the hilly neighborhood of Santa Teresa until the military government agreed to release 15 political prisoners. Starring Alan Arkin as Elbrick and Pedro Cardoso as Fernando Gabeira, on whose 1979 novel/account O Que É Isso, Companheiro? the film is based, Four Days in September is an ultra-tense process movie and a complex, melancholic meditation—with a moving and haunting score by Stewart Copeland—on the everyday Brazilians who challenged and were ultimately destroyed by the dictatorship. 4K restoration courtesy of L.C. Barreto Produções Cinematográficas.