Almost Brothers

In this story of Miguel and Jorge, Lúcia Murat probes 50 years of violence, race and class in Brazil. Initially they are childhood friends—Miguel’s father was a liberal white musicologist; Jorge’s was a brilliant black samba musician who died without ever making a record. They meet again in the ’70s when Miguel is a political prisoner and Jorge is serving time for theft. Later, in present day Rio de Janeiro, Miguel has become a politician while Jorge organizes armed thugs in hillside shantytowns by cell phone from prison. Specific chromatic tones signal each decade as this unconventional narrative leaps from the present to the ’50s to the ’70s and back. In recent months, incriminating documents have surfaced which detail torture, disappearance and death throughout Brazil’s 21 years of military dictatorship, a history long buried and denied. Murat, herself imprisoned during that period, builds complex characters (featuring actors from the Nos do Cinema project, which trains youths from Brazil’s poorest communities for work in media and film) and refuses even an iota of romanticism. This timely film presents the stark visual contrast of the two faces of Rio de Janeiro—full Carnaval splendor and hillside slums—as Murat, with unwavering courage, grapples with brutality in its many forms, faces and rationalizations. –SFIFF