Shoot To Kill

Brazilian co-directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles take aim in Bacurau

THE NOTION FOR BACURAU CAME TO Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles a decade ago. They were celebrating the unveiling of their short film, Cold Tropics, a future-set tale in which temperatures drop to impossible lows in northeastern Brazil, when inspiration struck. “We had this good idea about a film we wanted to do,” says Dornelles, production designer on the short.

The result is another story set in near-future Brazil: a hallucinatory mix of western, sci-fi-and satire that plays like a sun-kissed Black Mirror episode. “We were in that mood of genre cinema,” says Dornelles, who graduates here to co-director with the more experienced Filho (Aquarius). “We wanted also to make more genre films in Brazil, because we don’t have a tradition of it. And we love genre films, of course.”

He’s not kidding either – Bacurau wears its influences proudly. At one point, a school depicted in the fictional town of Bacurau bears the name “João Carpinteiro” – a blatant tribute to John Carpenter, legendary director of The Thing and Halloween. “I’ve been talking about Carpenter since my short films,” says Filho. “He’s the filmmaker who at a very early age really showed me that I could maybe do something in terms of film.”