This week in class we watched Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil from 1964. Like the film Barren Lives by the other leading Cinema Novo figure, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, the film is set in a desert-like landscape where unprivileged Brazilians maneuver poverty and hierarchies of power and class mobility. Like some of the other films we have watched previously in class, such as Barravento, and Maranhão 66 which are also directed by Rocha, the film showcases multiple scenes of violence as implied by Rocha’s manifesto, Aesthetics of Hunger. Additionally, Barravento from last week reminded me a bit of the Luis Buñuel’s film Los Olvidados or the english title The Young and The Damned, as the film follows a group of children that also live in extreme poverty in Mexico city. Like Barravento, there is a scene where a chicken gets violently killed/decapitated at the hands of young people. This imagery reminded me Rocha’s manifesto and how poverty, violence and hunger are framed within the context of youth living in impoverished, developing countries.