Over the course of his prolific career, the Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho devoted himself to a cinema of encounters. His masterpiece, Man Marked for Death, 20 Years Later (1984), is arguably three films woven into one.
The first is a neorealist-inspired, fictionalized retelling of the 1962 murder of João Pedro Teixeira, the illiterate founder of the Association of Farmers and Agricultural Workers of Sapé. It is cast entirely with non-professionals, including Teixeira’s widow, Elizabeth, playing herself. Coutinho’s production began in early 1964 and lasted 35 days, until April 1, when a coup d’état established a military dictatorship that scarred the next 21 years of Brazilian history. All elements of the film’s production were seized. Some crew members were arrested. Elizabeth disappeared.
The second film takes place in 1981, when Coutinho was able to return to the locations of his original shoot to screen the surviving footage—the camera negatives from 1964, having been sent to Rio de Janeiro for development, escaped seizure by the authorities—and to record the memories of the film’s surviving participants seventeen years later.
The third film also begins in 1981, as Coutinho not only tracks down Elizabeth, now living under an assumed name in another state, but also attempts to uncover what happened to the 11 children she had with her late husband, almost all of whom were dispersed among other family members when Teixeira went into hiding.
Chosen by Kleber Mendonça Filho as one of the Brazilian titles in his expertly curated Film at Lincoln Center series “The Secret Agent Network,” Man Marked for Death encompasses many of the themes found across Filho’s body of work: the lone woman facing down tenebrous power structures (Aquarius, 2016), the adversity of a community in a dusty and remote hamlet (Bacurau, 2019), and the clandestine journey of refugees during the military dictatorship (The Secret Agent, 2024). Similarly, Filho shares Coutinho’s nearly Eisensteinian ability to capture a rich panorama of humanity. In one of his final interviews before his death in 2014, Coutinho even said that his films were less in Portuguese than in “Brazilian,” honoring the everyday speech of the countless real people whose personal histories he documented over decades
Man Marked for Death, 20 Years Later screens this evening, January 8, and on January 13, at Film at Lincoln Center as part of the series “The Secret Agent Network.” Kleber Mendonça will be in attendance for a Q&A.
