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.

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.

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.