Country: Brazil
Year: 1967
Duration: 65'


The film is divided into four parts. In the first part, young exponents of the middle class are interviewed as they are caught in their activities and their hobbies. They explain their problems simply. They talk to us about their future and their hopes. We can pick up a certain conformism hidden by different appearances. In the second part, adult life is treated. We look into the large residential centers of Copacabana and Rio de Janeiro. There are shots of everyday life in all its banality and misery. In the third part, we go over into the night of the middle class. There are internal and external shots of Rio by night and the old Lapa district. In the fourth part, violent and provocative images come on the scene. Isaltina, the miraculous saint of the incomprehensible language, involves twenty thousand people in a delirium of faith and magic. The film ends focused on the hesitant faces of people ask for an explanation that is not goin to be given.

""The Brazilian middle class tends not to take a stand, and when it does, it sides with the dominant class. The bourgeoisie in Brazil is a kind of extension of the middle class. Everybody in the country has a middle-class consciousness, even the urban proletariat and the upper bourgeoisie. For this reason, when all is said and done, the middle class moves around myths and passwords which are not its own, which come from the outside and so the middle class is itself into an agent of imperialism." (Arnaldo Jabor)

Biography

film director

Arnaldo Jabor

Cast

& Credits

Director and screenplay: Arnaldo Jabor.
Director of photography: Dib Lufti, José Medeiros, João Carlos Horta.
Editor: Arnaldo Jabor, João Ramiro Mello, Gilberto Macedo.
Sound: José Antonio Ventura.
Narratore: Fernando Garcia.
Production company: Arnaldo Jabor, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Jorge de Cunha Lima, João Carlos Simoes Correa, Verba S.A.
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