The Battle [2023]

 1968 was a watershed year for rousing anti-government and anti-establishment protest movements across the world, dominated in most cases by progressive students. It represented the peak of resistance in Brazil too which was under military dictatorship since 1964, and the Battle of Maria Antônia in October 1968, which was a conflict between the left-wing students and professors of São Paulo’s esteemed public university – who were fearlessly dissenting and demonstrating against the increasingly repressive dictatorship, and even hosting a referendum against it – and the vicious fascist militia from a private institute across the street who were actively assisted by the police, represented a tragic pivotal moment for the country. Made with the aesthetics of guerilla filmmaking and structured in the form of a lost revolutionary diary, Vera Egito’s The Battle is a scintillating account of the fateful final 24 hours of that clash that ended with state-sponsored crackdown and suspension of the final vestiges of civil liberties in Brazil. Evocatively shot in grainy 16mm B/W, the film chronicled the flurry of happenings – interlaced with poetic undertones and two stirring relationships, viz. a long brewing romance between a married prof and her colleague who she’s known since their student days, and a sudden passionate affair between two dazzling female students – by thrillingly intercutting between those already at the struggle’s forefront and those who’re organically drawn out of their non-committal stances. Egito eloquently recalled the 21 dark years of dictatorship by breaking the film into 21 brilliantly orchestrated sequences, with all of them being bravura single-take tracking shots, wherein the camera glided through parallel and interrelated interactions and actions, across both closed and open spaces, within the course of each shot composition.

p.s. Watched it at the 2024 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES)

Director: Vera Egito

Genre: Drama/Historical Drama

Language: Portuguese

Country: Brazil