The Rise Of ‘Bacurau’

Cinema, Necropolitics And [Counter]Violence

Abstract

This paper is a historical and critical analysis of the Brazilian film Bacurau (2019), written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, which articulates a cinematographic view of the country's history, problematizing both the dilemmas currently faced and the past of resistance of groups historically marked by differences based on customs and traditions, in confronting contemporary necropolitics. The film review understood Bacurau as a space to debate for brazilian social issues, such as local tradiotional colonel policies (represented by Mayor Toni Jr.) and economical practices centered on geographical poles of power (represented by the characters of the Southeast) which, following the logic of globalized financial capitalism, they produce, from the precariousness of the lives of the most vulnerable people, a kind of human safari of the subjects, promoting a trivialization of the life of the other. This is understood, just as in the movie, as victims of a neocolonialist policy of death on a large scale, but which can be tackled from the cultural tradition of insurgent subjects from northeastern Brazil, through a policy of differences built from the margins as response to oppressions, which at least, in their film representations, inspire life.