Vidas Secas

"The work of an enormously gifted director." -- Vincent Canby, The New York Times
Vidas Secas (Barren Lives) is the cornerstone of the Cinema Novo movement. Derived from Graciliano Ramos' eponymous novel, this Brazilian Grapes of Wrath is set in the early 1940s, and describes two years in the life of an itinerant cowhand's family struggling to eke out an existence in the drought-ravaged, landowner-dominated serto of the country's Northeast. The film is stark in its imagery and a powerful documentation of the uprooted. At the time of its theatrical release, Vidas Secas was considered the absolute last word as a realistic film depiction of the wretched earth. Today it somehow seems much more - a white-hot, almost mystically intense pilgrim's progress through an unending purgatory with no other side.