Presented as part of You Say You Want a Revolution?

"Startlingly original and poetical in conveying the hope and despair of the oppressed."—Ted Shen, Chicago Reader

Featuring a conversation with Kathleen Newman and Rachael L. Pasierowska after the 5/30 screening.

60th Anniversary | 4K Restoration!

Glauber Rocha's sophomore feature, Black God, White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol; literally, "God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun"), is a scorched-earth allegory about the blind followers of dead-end ideologies. Somewhere in the Brazilian hinterlands of the 1940s, ranch hand Manoel becomes an outlaw after killing his swindling boss. He pledges allegiance to Sebastia~o, a self-styled holy man who preaches revolt against rich landowners even as he perpetrates unspeakable acts of violent zealotry against the innocent. While the landowners hire a mercenary to take out Sebastia~o, Manoel and his wife Rosa join bandits Corisco and Dada´, only to find themselves once more in league with evil, deluded forces. Steeped in history, myth, religion, and politics, and suffused with the feverish intensity of the blistering desert, Black God, White Devil is one of the Cinema Novo movement's most uncompromising statements on current social issues as well as the universal problem of mindless fanaticism. And as William Repass put it writing for Slant Magazine, "More than allegorizing third-world revolutionary and decolonial struggles, Rocha stages a mythmaking intervention into Brazilian history."