Brazil in Locarno: ‘The Riverbank’ sets Recife’s mangroves against the gospel of power

Erotic thriller? Queer magical realism? "The Riverbank" challenges simplistic categorisations. Gatopardo Filmes

Backed by Pernambuco’s unique film ecosystem, debut filmmakers Enock Carvalho and Matheus Farias turn a queer romance into a haunting exploration of faith, politics and Brazil’s cinematic margins. They spoke to Swissinfo as the film contends for the main prize at Locarno Film Festival.

Where the Capibaribe River meets the concrete shores of Recife, the Brazilian northeastern capital of Pernambuco, it becomes a muddy swamp. Somewhat isolated from the frenzy of city life, this swamp is a point of fascination for filmmakers Enock Carvalho and Matheus Faria, whose feature-length debut The Riverbank held its world premiere in Locarno’s Concorso Internazionale on August 11.

Beyond giving the film its title, the riverbank is an essential character in the story of protagonist Izaquiel (Caique Copque), who is in the habit of visiting the swamp’s cruising scene. It is there that he meets Jeremias (Ítalo Martins), a mysterious figure imbued with the essence of the river, who, though unmistakably human, seems to exist between the realms of magic and reality. As their relationship deepens, Jeremias becomes a kind of spiritual guide in Izaquiel’s journey toward self-knowledge.

Enock Carvalho (left) and Matheus Farias at Locarno’s Red Carpet. Locarno Film Festival / Ti-Press

Jeremias’s presence gives the film a surreal bent that pushes it beyond easy categorization; one sexual encounter with Izaquiel morphs into something akin to spiritual possession. Their dalliances, always on the riverbank, and always at night –– photographed in velvety blue tones by cinematographer Luciana Baseggio –– contrast with the thriller-like pace of Izaquiel’s daily life as he unwittingly returns to the environment from which his identity as a gay man forced him to run: the evangelical church.

The church in the film is the radical counterpoint of the riverbank, a microcosm of a space from where the modern Brazilian extreme-right staged its rise with a blend of religiosity and political violence. By day, Izaquiel works as a janitor at the theatrically named Spring Church, led by Eurico (played by actor Robério Diógenes, who also worked in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent), a pastor with megalomaniacal notions of how to spread the gospel.

The directors’ combination of a folkloric framing with the rhythm of a thriller is part of the reason why The Riverbank was selected to compete in Locarno’s main slate, rather than Concorso Cineasti del Presenti, the section of the festival dedicated to feature debuts.

To the directors, being placed alongside lauded filmmakers like the South Korean Hong Sang-soo and the French-Canadian Denis Côté validated the film’s complex appeal. “When Giona [Nazzaro, artistic director of the festival] announced the film in Locarno’s press conference, he called it an erotic thriller,” Carvalho recalls. “We welcome that description.”

Actors Ítalo Martins (Jeremias, front) and Caique Copque (Ezaquiel) in the mangrove at night. Gatopardo Filmes

There’s something in the water

Izaquiel’s tenure in Spring Church dovetails with the attempt by Eurico’s son, Eliel, to run for Congress on a conservative, evangelically-minded agenda. In Brazil, the various Presbyterian churches have become a powerful political machine –– evangelical congressmen and women make upExternal link over 40% of the lower house of Congress.

Their influence helped elect Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency, a project witnessed first-hand by Farias, who grew up in the church before leaving it to “embrace the devil” of his identity as a gay man. “During my last years in the church, there was a coordinated effort to elect an evangelical president,” he says, noting that Bolsonaro is not himself a member of the evangelical church –– he is a declared Catholic, though he was also baptized by an evangelical pastor in Israel. Still, the ex-president is a fitting embodiment of evangelical ideology.

Veteran actor Robério Diógenes incarnates the spectre of Bolsonarism with his character, the pastor Eurico – which, in Portuguese, can be read as a wordplay of “eu” (I, me), “rico” (rich). Almost all the other characters, including trans women, have biblical names. Gatopardo Filmes

Farias recalls feeling a disorienting sense of responsibility when Bolsonaro was elected: “What I had helped build during so many years in the church finally became true. Except, I wasn’t part of the church anymore, and I suffered the consequences of its project, not only as a gay man, but also as a filmmaker.”

Under bolsonarism, Brazil went through a period that Farias calls “four years of cultural hollowing,” when state financing for artists dried up completely. Now, under a new administration, the cultural landscape in the country is going through a rebirth.

‘Hellcife’, Brazil’s film capital

Since the 1990s, Recife – or Hellcife, as locals describe the city’s blistering tropical heat – has been a breeding ground for Brazilian independent cinema. Its watershed moment came with the film Perfumed Ball (Baile Perfumado, 1996), by Lírio Ferreira and Paulo Caldas, in which the striking mixture of regional themes and urban modernity rode alongside Recife’s Mangue Beat movement in music.

>> Perfumed Ball is set in the 1930s, following a famous band of outlaws in the Brazilian outbacks. Major exponents of Recife’s Mangue Beat movement, Chico Science & Nação Zumbi composed the film’s soundtrack:

Now, with the ascendant success of Kléber Mendonça Filho, whose film The Secret Agent takes place entirely in the city, Recife has kept its position as Brazil’s most successful, and innovative, cinematic hub.

Its public funding program allows filmmakers to experiment with form and style without having to attend to the commercial demands of economic hubs like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro; and a close-knit community means that resources are shared: The same camera that shot The Secret Agent, on which Farias worked as an editor, was used to film The Riverbank, and several actors recur across the two films.

“When we have access to the same technical quality, tools, and talented crew as productions like I’m Still Here or The Secret Agent, we can tell a story with a distinct tone and point of view that is still on the same level” as those other films, Carvalho emphasizes. This diversity of perspective is essential to a thriving national cinema –– it’s no coincidence that Recife has bred a new crop of daring filmmakers.

But if public funding can be ablessing, it can just as easily become the rope that suffocates production. Money that is tied to the state is vulnerable to the volatility of the political climate, a problem that Farias and Carvalho know all too well. Cinema financing in Pernambuco is now protected by law, a development which Farias underlines is paramount: “We have to care for and protect these initiatives, so they can continue to exist,” he says.

Cinema at the margins

For Brazilian filmmakers looking to push beyond convention, the Locarno Film Festival is a homecoming of sorts: Since awarding Glauber Rocha’s Entranced Earth with its highest prize in 1967, the festival has supported Brazilian arthouse efforts. The Cinema Novo movement of which Rocha was a central figure gave way to the grungier “cinema marginal,” a lineage into which Carvalho and Farias are tapping through their thematic concern with margins – the film that ‘inaugurated’ that movement was called, precisely, The Margin (by Ozualdo Candeias, 1967).

In the last decade, many of Brazil’s more feted – and damned – ‘marginal’ authors, such as Julio Bressane, Rogério Sganzerla, and Carlos Reichenbach, had their films screened in parallel sections celebrating their oeuvre. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s first feature, Neighbouring Sounds (2012), also awed international audiences in its second screening, which took place in Locarno right after its premiere in Rotterdam. More recently, in 2022, Julia Murat’s Rule 34 took home Locarno’s main prize, the Golden Leopard.

The Riverbank gives center stage to the queer experience which is routinely marginalized in a conservative context, but it also addresses the margins in more abstract ways –– by exploring the marginal space between reality and magic that Jeremias occupies, for example.

Fantasy is our reality

In that sense, the film nods to the Latin American tradition of magical realism: “It’s very hard to separate Brazil from a rather fantastical point of view, which is part of our culture and of the diversity of experience we have in the country,” Carvalho says. “If, on the one hand, we have suffered many years of violence and open wounds, on the other hand we have a cultural and religious diversity that feeds the collective imagination, and they give us alternate ways of seeing the country.”

This alternate perspective is what the directors aimed to depict through Izaquiel’s story, and through the riverbank itself. “The swamp is a place of life and death, of permeability, where animals are born and also where they decompose,” Farias says, and Carvalho complements: “It exists despite the sewage flowing there; it fights the adversities imposed by humanity. It made a lot of sense for us that marginalized, clandestine activity would happen somewhere that society itself doesn’t care about.” In the swamp, Farias says, “you can hide in plain sight, subvert the rules, and create a new existence.”

To Carvalho, a magical-realist point of view is inseparable from the experience of Brazilian daily life writ large: “Fantasy is our reality. We welcome fantasy in our film because we understand that it is possible; it exists.” For Izaquiel, and for his creators, confronting the hard light of day doesn’t do away with the magic of nightfall –– it only emphasizes the need to protect it.

Rafaela Bassili is a Brazilian writer and film critic based in New York. Her writing on film, books, and television has appeared in The Guardian, New York Magazine, Mubi, and The Atlantic.

Edited by Eduardo Simantob/ts