Walter Salles on ‘Barren Lives’
‘This film singlehandedly founds and justifies a Nation. Brazil has, at last, been discovered. It is a masterpiece.’ These were the words of the writer Otto Lara Resende upon leaving one of the first screenings of Barren Lives in 1963.
I had the same feeling when I watched Barren Lives for the first time. It felt like an unveiling, exposing the deepest essence of our country. I was seized by the characters; by the harsh, minimalist narrative, at once cruel and transcendent. I found myself transported to the badlands of the Brazilian sertão, into the heart of a family forced to keep moving to escape starvation, in search of the bare essentials: water.
The concise, stripped-down prose of Graciliano Ramos finds its most faithful translation in the equally concise narrative of Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s film. Here, actors and non-actors become one. On-location filming, no soundtrack, precise, unadorned shots: Nelson eschewed any element that would aestheticise the action. The crew was also lean: fewer than 20 people. In Barren Lives, he embraced the Italian neorealist production model, but went a step further, expressing it in an utterly Brazilian way.
Nelson and his cinematographer Luiz Carlos Barreto gave a name to what became known as ‘the Brazilian light’: a natural light, metered to trace the faces of the film’s characters, not the physical landscape surrounding them. This was no longer filtered light propped up by reflectors. The unrelenting sun of the sertão overexposes the frame, blinding the characters and our own perception as viewers. In Barren Lives, form and content walk hand in hand.
Brazilian culture offers layered reflections of a vast and complex country in a trance, with traits that are simultaneously continental and regional. This culture tends to be better known for its exuberance than for its capacity to say so much with so little. Barren Lives blazed a path toward a broader understanding of Brazilian identity. To this day, it still reverberates, and inspires new generations of Brazilian filmmakers and cinephiles.
In 1963, the critic Alex Viany wrote that ‘Vidas secas is the best Brazilian film ever made.’
I venture to say the same in 2026.
Sight and Sound, June 2026
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
A master who outlived the majority of his disciples, Nelson Pereira dos Santos represents the beginning and arguably the end of modernity in Brazilian cinema. Leading 1960s auteur Glauber Rocha wrote that dos Santos’s debut feature Rio, 40 Degrees (Rio 40 graus, 1955) was the ‘fertilization point’ of Cinema Novo, the movement that radicalised national filmmaking and would incorporate dos Santos himself with the slightly younger generation. His career spans six decades, a milestone in a country which has never produced a stable industrial filmmaking model.
Dos Santos emerged from privilege and as a young man was involved with the Brazilian radical left. His discovery of Italian neorealism proved a lasting influence on his work – and, remarkably, he was perhaps the last filmmaker working prolifically at the start of the 21st century to claim such a direct lineage.
An assistant on the mainstream Brazilian song and dance chanchadas, dos Santos was also drawn to newsreel filmmaking starting in the late 40s. The confluence of the two genres led him to the docu-realistic Rio, 40 Degrees. Breaking from classical representation, the film and its subsequent spiritual sequel Rio zona norte (1957) – which tipped heavily to the commercial chanchada form – set the tone for films dealing with poor and marginal communities in Brazil.
Dos Santos’s next phase, departing from neorealism and plunging into a counter-cinema style, was one of unrivalled ambition: adapting some of the most challenging Brazilian literary works of the 19th and early 20th century to the screen. The result of this period is still staggering: the austere migrant tale Barren Lives (Vidas secas, 1962), based on the novel by Graciliano Ramos; The Alienist (Azyllo muito louco, 1970), a transformation of Machado de Assis’s political allegory into a veiled commentary about Brazil’s then-military regime; How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (Como era gostoso meu francês, 1971), which takes as its primary source the foundational Anthropophagic Manifesto by cultural cannibalist Oswald de Andrade; and Memories of Prison (Memorias do cárcere, 1984), which returned dos Santos to Ramos, this time tackling the author’s prison years as a communist dissident in 30s Brazil (an experience that sharply resonated at the tail-end of Brazil’s second-wave dictatorship).
Dos Santos’ work encompasses much of the last 250 years of Brazilian history, in all of its forms. In the revival period of Brazilian film following a lengthy drought, the country’s most exported contemporary directors (Walter Salles, Fernando Meirelles) seemed to have fully absorbed dos Santos’s example. And for the first time in his storied career, the director began to operate in a minor key, as a TV documentarian covering subjects as varied as the musician Tom Jobim, the Portuguese language and, most presciently, political corruption.
Gabe Klinger, Sight and Sound, March 2019
Barren Lives Vidas secas
Director: Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Production Company: Producoes Cinematograficas L.C. Barreto
Producers: Luiz Carlos Barreto, Herbert Richers, Danilo Trelles
Screenplay: Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Based on the novel by: Graciliano Ramos
Directors of Photography: Luiz Carlos Barreto, José Rosa
Editor: Rafael Justo
Music: Leonardo Alencar
Sound: Geraldo José
Technical Adviser: Waldemar Lima
Cast
Atila Iorio (Fabiano, the father)
María Ribeiro (Vitoria, the mother)
Orlando Macedo (Amarelo, the soldier)
Jofre Soares (the farmer)
Gilvan, Genivaldo (boys)
Baleia (the dog)
Gilvar Lima
Oscar de Souza
José Leite
Nabor Costa
Vanuterio Maia
Maria Rosa
Orlando Chagas
Ignacio Costa
Manuel Ordonio
Antonio Soarez
Brazil 1963
100 mins
Digital 4K
The screening on Wed 10 Jun will be introduced by Dr Tiago de Luca, University of Warwick
Presented as part of the UK/Brazil Season of Culture 2025-26 and supported by Instituto Guimarães Rosa
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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