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In "Joaquim" - which is competing at the Berlin Film Festival
- the eponymous 18th century second lieutenant works at a
checkpoint catching gold smugglers.
He falls in love with a black slave and hopes to buy her freedom
but struggles to get the promotion he needs to provide the
funds, with one of his peers telling him you have to be
well-born to rise up.
When Joaquim is sent on a mission to find new sources of gold,
he ends up wanting to free Brazil from colonial power Portugal,
encouraged by his lover and books a man gives him.
"When you go to a psychoanalyst, if you are having a crisis and
you lie down on the couch, the psychoanalyst asks who is your
father and who is your mother? How was your life with them? In
order to understand the present day crisis," Brazilian Director
Marcelo Gomes told Reuters in an interview.
"So I think I did the same thing here - I went back 200 years to
the birth of the Brazilian nation to understand the present day
crisis. I uncovered the flaws of the past to understand the
flaws of today," he added.
Gomes said the "social fractures" of the colonial era were still
visible in Brazilian society and modern-day examples of
corruption included companies not paying their taxes.
Isabel Zuaa, who plays the black slave Preta, said she faced
prejudice on a daily basis in real life and relished the chance
to play a woman who stirs up revolutionary feelings in Joaquim.
"What I want to bring to the screen are themes that are very
current, things that I face in my everyday life, things that are
connected to survival, to resistance and to strategy in order to
survive in a world where my body, my color, is looked down on,"
she told journalists.
"Joaquim" is, along with 17 other films, competing for the
Golden and Silver Bears at the 'Berlinale'.
(Writing by Michelle Martin; Editing by Dominic Evans)
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