Introduction

In 1964 Eduardo Coutinho, then a young filmmaker with ties to a leftist student organization, started shooting a film in the northeast of Brazilabout a political activist and peasant leader named João Pedro Teixeira, who had been allegedly murdered by a local landowner. The film, Cabra marcado para morrer (Man Marked to Die), was to be a reenactment of the events in his life, performed by nonprofessional actors, all of them peasants like the main character. After 35 days of shooting, however, the project was abruptly interrupted by a military coup that on April 1 put an end to the democratic, left-leaning presidency of João Goulart. The newly installed government banned political freedom and initiated a period of authoritarianism that would last another two decades. Caught in the midst of the turmoil, the history of Cabra marcado para morrer could have ended at that very moment when the euphoria of the early 1960s was violently disrupted by the Brazilian military. Instead, Coutinho’s project resurfaced several years later, resulting in one of the most important Brazilian documentaries of the second half of the twentieth century. In the late 1970s, just as the military dictatorship began to wane, Coutinho decided to revisit Cabra marcado para morrer and turn it into a different film.