In the Intense Now (2017)
(No Intenso Agora, João Moreira Salles, Brazil 2017, 127 min., DCP, Portuguese and French w/subtitles)
Labor Film Series | Rochester Premiere. Like Chris Marker’s classic documentary A Grin Without a Cat, João Moreira Salles’s film speaks to the late 1960s as a moment of great historical intensity. Footage from China during the 1966 Cultural Revolution is juxtaposed with that of the French students’ uprising in May of 1968 and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of the same year. Funerals of students, workers, and police officers link the events of 1968 in the cities of Paris, Lyon, Prague, and Rio de Janeiro. The footage, all of it archival, reveals the state of mind of those filmed—joy, enchantment, fear, disappointment, dismay—and sheds light on the relationship between a film document and its political context.