Bacurau
Short description
Set in the Brazilian sertão, Bacurau is a small, close-knit community where daily life goes on around a school, a market and a church. When its matriarch Carmelita dies at the age of 94, the residents mourn her and then make a strange discovery: their village has begun to disappear from maps. Contact with the outside world breaks down piece by piece, and the settlement is gradually cut off, with water delivered by tanker after a local politician interferes with supply. What begins as an isolated, mysterious situation turns into a confrontation when armed outsiders arrive with hostile intentions. The villagers, whose solidarity is deeply rooted, must decide how to defend themselves and their home.
Kleber Mendonça Filho directed Bacurau together with Juliano Dornelles; the two also wrote the screenplay. It followed Aquarius in Mendonça Filho's filmography and stars Bárbara Colen, Thomás Aquino, Silvero Pereira, Sônia Braga, Udo Kier and Thardelly Lima, among a credited cast of 36. Made for about 1 million USD, it returned roughly 4 million USD worldwide, a strong multiple for a Brazilian-French production of its scale. On IMDb it holds 7.3/10 from nearly 35,000 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 7.6/10 from around 1,200 votes; a critics' rating of 7.8/10 from 170 reviews places it slightly above the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Approximately 10 years passed between the initial idea for the project and its realization, and the final version of the script was completed three years before the premiere.
- The village of Bacurau is fictional. In reality, the film was shot in the hamlet of Barra, near the town of Parelhans in the state of Rio Grande do Norte. The village has a population of 80 people, most of whom participated in the production as laborers and extras. After filming was completed, the filmmakers organized a special screening in Barra, which was attended by nearly 3,000 people.
- The school shown in the film is named Joao Carpinteiro. In Brazilian Portuguese, this translates to "John Carpenter." The film's director, Kleber Mendonça Filho, is a great admirer of Carpenter's films.
- The film was named after the last morning bus route in Recife. The name derives from "nightjar." In the language of the Tupi people (who inhabited almost the entire coast of Brazil before the arrival of Europeans), these birds are called "wakura'wa."
- The film contains references to so-called 'cangaço' (a form of social banditry in Brazil in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where people became nomadic bandits roaming the country in search of money, sustenance, and revenge) and to its most famous representative, Virgulino Ferreira da Silva, nicknamed Lampião (1897-1938), whose gang terrorized even small towns.
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