Cabra Marcado Para Morrer

The middle is a bit messy, but otherwise it's a brilliant, and towards the end emotional, portrait of the scars left by several decades of military rule in Brazil. It takes a very personal approach to the subject matter, with the political underpinnings undeniable but rarely at the forefront. It's not the story of a movement or a society, though undeniably sheds some light on both, but a story about a group of people and their fates, and that lets the film craft a complex and revealing portrait.

Interesting premise and some interesting history, but ultimately didn't grab me as much as it has others. Wish they could have gotten a reunion scene to tie it all together toward the end of the film. It's still a pretty good documentary, though.

One would expect that in political situations like that first comes the documentary which is supposed to record the "actuality" and then a fiction may come afterwards as a reconstruction so to say, but in this case it's the reverse; a fiction film suspended by a coup, a struggle destroyed in its nascent state. Coutinho answers this violence with the incompleteness and ever-becoming structure of his documentary, making it a body-without-organs for all subsequent research for archive and truth.

It could have been a conventional report, told as if Coutinho were just a TV journalist. But he asks questions without being emotional, and reconstructs broken lifes in an engaging, sober filmmaking.