For an aesthetics of thirst Bacurau is a city in the inland of Pernambuco, in a dystopian future. Days after the death of Carmelita, a matriarch of 94 years old, the inhabitants discover that their city disappeared of all the maps. Carmelita is the metaphor of a Brazil that died, but that left a legacy of affection and joy, having generated many children that were spreading by the world. The matriarch’s funeral scene is a kind of great collective cathartic celebration. “Bacurau” will also be, paraphrasing the opening song of the film itself, a Brazilian song to hear after Carnival, at the end of the party, or an unidentified flying object that seems to have lost its identity. In the mythical Brazilian “sertão”, immortalized in literature by João Guimarães Rosa “Grande Sertão: Veredas”, 1956 or Euclides da Cunha “Os Sertões”, 1902 and in cinema by Ruy Guerra “Os Fuzis”, 1964 and Glauber Rocha “Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol”, 1964, and “António das Mortes”, 1969, “Bacurau” traces a return to that historically forgotten territory, marginalized and exploited by the Brazilian central power. Inscribed in the best Glauberian tradition, Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles use the dystopian allegory to talk about Brazilian society of today, in this troubled phase of transition from Lula to Bolsonaro, a Brazil that seems to still live in an apparent state of collective trance. The matriarch’s death unleashes a series of memories and ghosts of the past that threaten the survival of the community. The film is populated by a series of symbolic characters, such as the doctor Domingas (in another surprising performance of Sónia Braga), the unscrupulous mayor Tony Júnior or the DJ Urso (a kind of modern substitute of Cego Júlio de “Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol”), which help to understand the complexity of Brazilian society at the particular moment in which it lives, accentuated by the mixture of different cinematographic genres – such as western, allegory, science fiction, the gore of terror. The final song of the film, a requiem that became famous by Geraldo Vandré, seems to propose a possible redemption: “I came here just to say / No one will shut me up / If someone has to die / That it will be to improve / So much life to live.” The film thus ends in a collective moment in which the common good is more important than the individual good, and that only by the union of wills can overcome adversities and defeat the system of those who want to redefine the rules of the world only for their own benefit. (PC)