Bacurau

Kleber Mendonça Filho and his production designer Juliano Dornelles co-directed Bacurau, which shared the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2019 with Ladj Ly's Les Misérables. It is a Brazilian-French co-production shot on 35mm anamorphic in Pernambuco, and it arrived in the middle of Bolsonaro's first year in office, which is not incidental to how it was received.

The village of Bacurau, somewhere in the sertão a few years from now, holds a funeral for its oldest resident, and then finds that the water truck has been shot at, the phone signal has gone and the settlement no longer appears on satellite maps. Sônia Braga plays the town doctor and Udo Kier turns up as something else entirely. The influences are worn openly — Carpenter, Leone, Glauber Rocha — and the score leans on Brazilian psychedelia alongside a John Carpenter cue.

What made it a phenomenon rather than a genre curio is the political charge: a film about a poor community that turns out to be far better organised than the people who came for it, released to a country whose government was busy dismantling its cultural institutions. At 3.92 on Letterboxd from 188,000 ratings, it is one of the most-loved Latin American films of the decade, and it makes a useful double bill with Mendonça Filho's The Secret Agent.