Bacurau

• The town school is named João Carpinteiro, the literal Portuguese translation of John Carpenter, a direct tip of the hat from co-director Kleber Mendonça Filho. Carpenter's own track 'Night,' off his 2014 Lost Themes album, plays on the soundtrack during the village dance scene.
• It was shot for roughly $1.4 million in the village of Barra in the municipality of Parelhas and the rural area of Acari in Rio Grande do Norte, deep in the Sertão do Seridó. The crew scouted more than 20 towns across the northeastern interior before settling on the location.
• Despite the anamorphic widescreen look, it was captured on an ARRI Alexa Mini paired with vintage Panavision Anamorphic C-series lenses, with the crew laying around 1,300 meters of camera track over an eight-week shoot.
• The title is the Portuguese word for the nightjar, a nocturnal bird, fitting for a town that only bares its teeth after dark.
• It shared the Jury Prize at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, splitting the award ex aequo with Ladj Ly's Les Misérables.
• The local museum is dressed with historical photographs of cangaceiros, the early-20th-century outlaw folk heroes like Lampião and Maria Bonita, who were decapitated by police and whose severed heads were put on display, an image the film deliberately recreates when the villagers line up the hunters' heads on the museum's doorstep once they win.

The museum is the whole movie in miniature. Those photos of villagers standing over severed heads aren't set dressing, they're instructions. Bacurau has beaten erasure before and the past is literally hung on the wall as a how-to manual. When the survivors recreate that tableau at the end, the film is saying resistance here is hereditary, not heroic.

The hunters from the global north and the complicit Brazilian politicians map cleanly onto the country's real power structure: water and land sold off to outside money while the interior is treated as expendable. The mercenaries paying to murder the poor for sport is the violence of that arrangement made literal.

The psychotropic drug the villagers take before the fight reframes the usual narcotics-destroy-communities script. Here the substance bonds the town and unlocks its capacity for collective violence, suggesting the community's real weapon isn't firepower but the refusal to be picked off one by one, a togetherness the isolated, status-obsessed hunters can't match.

A few years from now, in the parched Brazilian sertão, the tiny village of Bacurau buries its 94-year-old matriarch and then quietly disappears from the internet's maps. The cell signal dies. A UFO-shaped drone hangs in the sky. Out past the dirt roads, a pack of moneyed foreigners has paid to hunt human beings, and the locals are the quarry. What the killers don't clock is that Bacurau has survived erasure before. The town doses up, arms itself, and turns the safari inside out, settling the score with a fury the museum's old photographs already predicted.</synopsis> <parameter name="trivia">["The town school is named João Carpinteiro, the literal Portuguese translation of John Carpenter, a direct tip of the hat from co-director Kleber Mendonça Filho. Carpenter's own track 'Night,' off his 2014 Lost Themes album, plays on the soundtrack during the village dance scene.", "It was shot for roughly