Aquarius

Kleber Mendonça Filho's Aquarius opened in competition at Cannes 2016, generating significant attention not only for the film but for the cast and crew's silent on-stage protest at the festival, holding signs against the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. Sônia Braga's central performance was widely considered an Oscar-class lead overlooked by the Academy. The film won Best Film at the São Paulo International Film Festival and consolidated Mendonça Filho, after his earlier Neighbouring Sounds, as one of Brazil's most internationally important contemporary directors.

Clara (Braga), a sixty-five-year-old retired music critic, lives in the last occupied apartment of the Aquarius (a 1940s beachfront building in Recife) while developers circle her home and pressure her to sell. The film follows her quiet, immovable refusal across the months that follow: visits from her grown children, encounters with her late husband's relatives, the developers' increasingly aggressive harassment, and a series of memory-suspended flashbacks to the building's earlier inhabitants.

The film operates simultaneously as character study, real-estate-thriller, political allegory and meditation on cultural memory. Pedro Sotero and Fabricio Tadeu's photography of Recife (the apartment interiors, the seafront promenade, the still beachscape) produced one of the most distinctive visual registers of 2010s Brazilian cinema. Braga's performance is one of the great late-career leads in any cinema, and the film's reputation has only grown since release.