The year 1968 in Brazil is laid bare in this turbulent and radical film about turbulent and radical times. Russian premiere in the programme The Rebellion of Dreams. Directed by Glauber Rocha.
Cancer
- Date:
- 26 Mar 2026,
19:30–21:10
- Age restrictions
- 18+
Registration opens two weeks before the screening.
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Cancer was shot in just four days, in a feverish atmosphere of anticipation: Rocha was waiting for bureaucratic obstacles delaying the production of Antonio das Mortes to be cleared. It was August 1968, and the military dictatorship in Brazil had unleashed a wave of repression, triggering mass protests and armed resistance. In this climate, Rocha took to the streets with the cast of Antonio das Mortes and a camera, relying only on a rough draft of the script and improvisation, to film ten vignettes about a country plunged into a state of endless conflict, driven by racism, unemployment, authoritarianism, violence, and lies.
Câncer
1972, Glauber Rocha
Brazil
86 minutes, Portuguese with Russian subtitles
Starring: Odete Lara, Hugo Carvana, Antônio Pitanga, Rogério Duarte, Hélio Oiticica
Shot from Cancer, 1972
It is the “Pulp Fiction” of the 1960s, more politically transparent, with the same reflection on genres, one of the starting points (and arrival) of the playful but angry postmodern.
— Leonardo Persia, Rapporto Confidenziale
The short episodes are intercut with near-documentary street scenes from Rio de Janeiro, as well as with Rocha’s own observations and reflections. And if at the beginning, amid the architecture of Rio’s famous Museum of Modern Art, he sets out the film’s themes and describes the filming process, at the end he provides an eccentric conclusion, repeating the same phrase several times: “In those days the city was hallucinating, like a cancer!”
Cancer stands in stark contrast to Rocha’s other films, which are usually epic in scale, weaving together symbols and iconography from multiple historical epochs. Inspired by the structural experiments of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, the Brazilian filmmaker applies their methods to material that is chaotic and ironic, much of it generated in the course of shooting itself. The result is his most uninhibited film, remarkable for exposing the machinery of cinema and at the same time deconstructing the entire country at one of the most critical moments in its modern history.
