A Batalha da Rua Maria Antônia, a sensual film, as ardent as the youthful passions it portrays, confirms itself as one of the great surprises of the 68th Seminci. It is a film about the effervescence of the Brazilian May ’68 through a group of students who, for a few hours, participated in the protests that caught the selection committee with a magnificent grainy black and white -so that “the audience feels that they are there, at that moment, just as it would have been shot then”, according to the director Vera Egito- and some sequence shots in real time executed with an uncommon mastery.
Egito began to plan the script in 2010 as a reminder of the past that, after Jair Bolsonaro came to power, became a story about the present. “The privileges of the Mackenzie students are the same that you find among the elites of Brazil today,” the filmmaker said, referring to the young people of that private school, who were sympathetic to the military dictatorship, who confronted those of the revolutionary University of São Paulo.
With a large representation of non-professional actors and a specific direction for the extras, A Batalha da Rua Maria Antônia recovers an unknown chapter of the South American country’s history to warn of the dangers of authoritarianism and reaffirm the value of a democracy threatened by multiple threats.
