“Resistance, Necropolitics, and Revenge Fantasies - Bacurau (2019) by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles”

Bacurau by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles was the most controversial Brazilian film of 2019. It premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize and went on to win a series of national and international awards. It was praised and criticized as a film of resistance against the Bolsonaro government, and its sexist, racist and homophobic discourse, but also as Manichean. This article seeks to analyse some of the central aspects of the film, mainly by focusing on its narrative: the dehumanization of the people from the Brazilian Northeast of African or mixed-racedescent and its relation to the resistanceof the cangaço, the polarization of the film's reception, the issue of resistance within the context of maroon societies), the questions of race and gender, the problem of the certainty of death,given biopower and necropolitics, as well as revenge fantasies based on the visual pleasures of violence. The main objective of this article is to understand whether the film contributes to the debate on racism in Brazil, or whether it is just an escape valve for political frustrations, offering viewers a fleeting cathartic moment. We concludethat the film avoids confronting the real reason for Brazilian necropolitics, i.e. the legacy ofcolonialism and slavery: racism.