Man Marked for Death, 20 Years Later
The Secret Agent Network
January 7 - 13
Eduardo Coutinho reconstructs a 1964 film halted by Brazil’s coup, fusing original footage and new interviews to trace the murder of labor leader João Pedro Teixeira and the enduring impact on those he left behind.
In 1964, Eduardo Coutinho was at work on a film about João Pedro Teixeira, who was murdered by the police as a result of his efforts to organize farm workers in northeast Brazil. The director cast non-actors in the production, including Teixeira’s widow, who plays herself, but shooting was cut short in the wake of the military coup that same year; footage was seized, and a number of participants imprisoned. The project resumed 20 years later, as the country was transitioning to a democracy, but had begun to take a rather different shape: Coutinho incorporated the earlier material as well new interviews with those originally involved and reflections on the injustices of the interval, yielding a prismatically reflexive, genre-defying essay on political commitment and life under dictatorship.
"Man Marked for Death, 20 Years Later is my favorite Brazilian film. It’s about the impact of political violence on one family in the northeast of Brazil. The father in the family was assassinated because he was a political leader for land reform in my local state. [Eduardo] Coutinho was actually trying to make a film with non-professional actors in 1964... in the middle of the shoot, the coup happened. The military took over, arrested the filmmakers, and confiscated the film. He went back in the early ’80s to see what happened to the family, and the resulting film is absolutely mesmerizing. It’s a beautiful film."
—Kleber Mendonça Filho
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