Tremor Iê

As we know, dystopias are diversions that highlight our here and now. Without costly sets or special effects, the Fortaleza depicted here (a decisive choice) would be today’s if it weren’t for its guards decked out in strange outfits and the shrill slogans emanating from loudspeakers. This, then, is the unmistakeable background for the action set in the near future of the recent past – the 2013 protests that shook Brazil – as we follow Janaína, who has just escaped from prison and met up with her friends. Scurrying across town by night, the city hollowed out by paternalistic, macho, “social-hygiene” omination – the basis of the struggle for this marginalised group of black or lesbian or poor women in this normative world, and clearly echoing a Brazil we know all too well. Directors Elena Meirelles and Lívia de Paiva (FIDLab 2018) and their crew with various roles (some of them alternate between writing and working in front of or behind the camera) offer this film as a counterweight, fuelled by a crossover of genres. It is often highly stylised, defending a body politic, blending chematised situations and action-movie techniques. This is a small-budget film that aims to respond to the emergency, an antidote to the sombre political fictions that have been written and the return of the old ghosts. Its humour is, at times, dark – see, for example, the tale of the ashes of the first president after the 1964 coup d’état. But it is also an impatient hymn to blind fury, in tune with the pounding rap lyrics that open the film: “get politicised, get organised, don’t get paralysed”. A film that welcomes potential beginnings and ongoing struggles, as illustrated by the closing dedication to Marylucia Mesquita Palmeira, Marielle Franco and Luana Barbosa. (N.F.)

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