Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury

A man does not die. When the Portuguese came he was a native warrior; he was killed and woke as a bird. Since then he returns with each death and lives again in four separate periods of Brazilian history. In the sixteenth century he fights the colonisers. In the nineteenth he stands with the communities of escaped slaves. In the seventies he joins the guerrilla against the military government. In 2096 water is in the hands of private companies and the city is fighting over it. In every period he finds the same woman. Janaína is someone else each time and does not remember him. Luiz Bolognesi writes and directs. Selton Mello and Camila Pitanga are among the voices. It is a Brazilian production made in animation. The film won the grand prize at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. Its structure is in four parts and each has a visual style of its own. The matter it treats is the repetition of resistance; the film builds Brazilian history as a cycle rather than a line. The last part is science fiction; the idea of water wars carries the film's own argument into the future. It is made for adults; violence and sexuality are shown directly. The animation is hand drawn and the use of colour changes from part to part. Its limit is structure; the four periods do not carry equal weight and the last is rushed. Who it is for: anyone curious about animation for adults and Latin American history. Who it is not for: the violence is explicit, the argument didactic, and the narrative episodic.