The dark side of the river (en)

A margem escura do rio

Selection: 

Director: 

Matheus Farias & Enock Carvalho

Country: 

  • Brazil

Format: 

Feature film

Type: 

Fiction

Film exhibited in Toulouse: 

In partnership with BrLab

Script writer(s): 

Matheus Farias, Enock Carvalho and Juliana Soares

Synopsis: 

Having hit hard times, the street-side cinema where Izaquiel works is sublet to a Pentecostal church. Izaquiel, a young black gay man and former evangelical Christian, is sucked into a spiral of harassment by the new tenants, a bunch of religious hardliners, with whom he wages a silent and increasingly violent war. Among the shadows of the mangroves, where he goes for sexual adventures with other men, Izaquiel will find a means to escape this somber reality. But the situation takes a violent turn and Izaquiel alone knows that something strange lurks in the cinema basement, and it’s a secret he must keep at all costs.

Visual concept: 

This project is a deeper immersion in the traditions and reinventions of genre cinema following our previous work. Through elements of fantasy filmmaking, the film poses a radical resistance while offering hope for the future for people like Izaquiel, whose very existences are threatened on a daily basis. As such, the film blends the real and the fantastical in a dense thriller that creates a metaphor for contemporary Brazil. This is, above all, a film impregnated with the spirit of our times.