This week in class we watched Glauber Rocha’s Barravento from 1962, and Arrial Do Cabo, from 1960. Although they are in different locations, Both of the films focus on the fisherman communities and fishing process in Brazil in the early 1960s. Arrial Do Cabo is a short that follows the preserving of fish, at the end of the film showing how the workers wind down after work. Although cinematically and compositionally the films are beautiful, they both have brutal subject matter-at least I found it hard to watch at times. The films both show the fish struggling to stay alive, on their last breath as they have been pulled out of the water in order to be preserved in salt for consumption. Additionally, Barravento shows an alive chicken being beaten to death. This sort of imagery reminded me of the short that was shown last week, Maranhão 66, which is also by Rocha. It shows extreme poverty in Brazil including children in slums, starved sick patients in hospitals and unpaid healthcare workers. This imagery aligns with Rocha’s manifesto, aesthetics of hunger, as it depicts the violence that is received and given by marginalized people in Brazil, as well as the conditions poor Brazilians live under hunger, both literal and in terms of social mobility.