The dark side of the river

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Note of intent

We were still writing the script when Brazil was highjacked by a populist conservative wave. Izaquiel, Juliana, Geraldo and the old Cinema are characters who bear the same burden: each in their own way being driven to the margins, swallowed by a ferocious monster avid for control. The Dark Side of the River is a counterattack, which, like Izaquiel, will bare its teeth. We delve into genre cinema which enables us to create new worlds and overcome what would destroy us.

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.