Brazil

Legend has it that the capoeira player Besouro Mangangá summoned Bahia’s full magical power to seal his body from harm. Neither bullets nor knives could pierce his skin anymore. But his enemies knew that the act of love could remove this magical protection and so they sent him a beautiful woman. Even today, young men in Santo Amaro tell each other the story of Besouro Mangangá and link it to the violent reality of their precarious lives.

THE BODY WON’T CLOSE is an intimate and sensory journey into the experiential worlds of young men at the margins of Brazilian society. Driven by a queer sensibility, the film poetically explores the dilemma of the human body as a porous structure and the impossibility of closing oneself off from the world, and from love.

What happens when your land is being claimed as event zone for the two biggest sport events of the planet? A question that applies to the Indigenous community of Aldeia Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as they face increased pressure ahead of the World Cup and the Olympic Games in Brazil. The Indigenous group lives right next to the sport stadium that stages the finals of both sport events. They wish to maintain their land as an Indigenous meeting place like it has been since the early 20th century, but that does not correspond with the plans of the Brazilian authorities and the multinational corporations coming with the sport events. From within the Indigenous settlement, the film explores how the arrival of the sport events is being experienced, how the pressure rises and how the community resists.

The Village Resists explores the city as the frontline for the Indigenous peoples’ struggle for land and survival. Any battle lost in the city can have serious consequences all over Brazil, as the recent rise in attacks on Indigenous territories and peoples have shown.

Within a neoliberal context marked by poverty and exclusion, land re-distribution together with food production become part of the return to the countryside.