Killed the Family and Went to the Movies

In a Rio de Janeiro apartment, a man kills the parents he lives with using a razor, and goes to the cinema. The film does not stage this as suspense; the act is shown coldly, almost with boredom. The narrative then moves onto an entirely separate track, to a house in Petrópolis and two women who find each other there. Júlio Bressane's film is among the best-known works of Brazil's Cinema Marginal. That movement was an underground formation working under the military dictatorship on tiny budgets with cheap materials, aiming not at narrative coherence but at breaking the order itself. It was shot on 16mm and blown up to 35mm. The narrative is fragmentary, the connections between scenes almost nonexistent, and the violence goes unexplained. Bressane is not trying to understand the murder but to show the order in which such a murder is possible. Who it's for: Viewers interested in experimental cinema, Latin American underground movements, and films that break the rules of narrative. Who it's not for: Entirely closed to anyone who wants plot, character or explanation. The violence and sexuality are also deliberately used to disturb.