"We're Talking About Brazil: Tortures" introduces to the French and the world about the current political situation of Brazil during military dictatorship
during its roughest years of brutality, prisons, tortures and even deaths. "La Jetée"'s creator Chris Marker interviews a few political prisoners who managed to survive the tortures and move to another countries after being traded by the American ambassador Charles Elbrick, who was kidnapped by revolutionary militants opposed to the regime - events depicted in "O Que é Isso, Companheiro?" (international title "Four Days in September", nominated for an Oscar). So, when Costa Gavras made his wonderful and realistic "State of Siege" this Marker film was probably one of the basis and references used to present to the audiences the cruelties behind a political system financed by American interests. Here's an important documentary that simply tells us things that are quite hard to understand or accept..but they're all true.
Marker talks with five or six of the 14 militants exchanged in the daring kidnap act that troubled Costa e Silva's government (they had to back out in a very weak way, things got worst in the following years, the 1970's and 1980's). The very first to speak (and the most well known) is José Ibrahim, who later on
became one of the founders of PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores - Labor's Party) in 1980. His talk along with his fellow comrades are purely devoted in explaining
how they were arrested, the tortures they faced like kicks, blows, cigarette burns, eletrical shocks in all body parts and the infamous and most used torture
instrument of the era, the pau de arara ("macaw's perch") where they tied the prisoner's hands and feet, leaving them upside down, usually naked while the torturer kept on beating them with sticks and other objects. That's how Communist or Socialist symphatizers were treated in order to give away information about their friends, or possible plans of attack to banks and institutions, which are becoming a act of defiance against the authorities.
France was dealing with a lot of revolutions and manifest back in 1968, but they also opened their eyes to the troubles and calamities of the world whether being the conflict in Vietnam, the racism in the U.S., the disorders in African nations and elsewhere. Not just Marker, but Godard also has a short excerpt presented in one of his Film-Tracts, Sartre wrote an essay using the testimonies of famous militant Carlos Marighella about how the forces of opression were acting in Brazil. And I salute
the importance they gave us back in that moment when the world was just waking up from a certain innocent and seeing the realities of the Cold War era and the
injustices of the world. Protests were made but little had changed and many other Latin American nations went through similar situations, or worse, all the way up
to the 1980's.
The documentary consists of interviews with the militants, very few archive images and one drawing depcting the real macaw's perch so you'll get the idea
of how torturous and painful that was. I've find myself immersed and curious in seeing a foreign view on a topic that I'm quite familiar through many other Brazilian films,
books and series, and in trying to imagine the impact it might have caused a film like this directed by an important director - he went on to make a similar one about
Chile and the coup on Salvador Allende. The version I saw was purely with French narration, a language in somewhat familiar and I had to absorb the most of what
the militants were saying when the narrator wasn't talking and translating their Portuguese talks - but since cinema is an universal language I got the most of it and highly
recommend. Also worth seeing is "Brazil: A Report on Torture", which I think presents some of the same characters presented in this film while they were in hiding in Uruguay. Both are important films about this issue. 10/10
