After the military coup in Brazil in March 1964, the new rulers stopped the fairer distribution of land that had already begun. The agrarian reforms implemented instead favoured big land owners and the agribusiness sector; unions were suppressed. Against this backdrop, Paulo Rufino and Ana Carolina address the struggles and hardships of agricultural labourers. In a free and poetical style, they assemble photographs, film sequences, quotes in words and images into an experimental collage that probes the limits of the documentary. In particular, they play with the instrument of repetition – in a kind of non-linear interpretation of “Lavra Dor” (1962) and other poems by Mário Chamie. The film was screened in the “Week of New Cinema: Latin America” section of the 1970 Berlinale which was compiled by Peter B. Schumann. Four years earlier, Schumann had already shown a cross section of the Brazilian “Cinema Novo” in West Berlin as part of the festival’s retrospective.

Florian Wüst