An absurdist Brechtian theatre of anti-colonial struggle in Rocha’s first film made in exile. Russian premiere of a restored copy in the programme The Rebellion of Dreams. Directed by Glauber Rocha.
The Lion Has Seven Heads
- Date:
- 4 Apr 2026,
18:00–19:45
- Age restrictions
- 18+
Registration opens two weeks before the screening.
T
In the Book of Revelation, the scarlet seven-headed beast symbolises the forces of earthly tyranny. In his first film made outside Brazil, Glauber Rocha—forced into exile by the military dictatorship—finds this beast in the powers ravaging Africa in the early years of postcolonialism, and more broadly the entire Third World, for which the director saw himself as a spokesperson.
Der Leone Have Sept Cabeças
1970, Glauber Rocha
Brazil–France–Italy
103 minutes, Portuguese with Russian subtitles
Starring: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Giulio Brogi, Rada Rassimov, Gabriele Tinti
Shot from The Lion Has Seven Heads, 1970
Rocha arguably had quite as much sense of composition and camera movement as Godard.
— Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
As ever, Rocha sets out to combine the incompatible—a quality in which he had few equals in the history of cinema. The Lion Has Seven Heads brings together a mysterious white prophet (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, an emblem of the French New Wave) and a mythical liberator drawn from Afro-Brazilian folklore; a Latin American revolutionary and a dictator sold out to foreign interests; a CIA agent and a German mercenary; a Portuguese capitalist and a sinister American tourist. These figures function less as fully realised characters than as types, and the carnival of exploitation, corruption, and struggles for liberation they enact unfolds in a distinctly Brechtian mode.
Once again, following Entranced Earth, Rocha turns to politically charged material while stubbornly emphasizing the theatrical nature of politics itself. His aim is not merely to glorify the oppressed and damn the oppressors, but above all to expose the absurdist logic of the spectacle that generation after generation has intoxicated and deceived millions of spectators. As the Brazilian visionary reminds us, history has a habit not only of introducing sudden twists into such plays, but of sweeping away—like a hurricane—the walls and roof of the political theatre itself. And that means that the myth of liberation, too, still has reason to hope.
