TWENTY YEARS LATER: A MAN MARKED TO DIE - BOOK RELEASE EVENT (1984)
Directed by Eduardo Coutinho
119 minutes
"TWENTY YEARS LATER rescues a history doubly interrupted by the brutal military coup of 1964 in Brazil: that of Peasant League activism and of Coutinho's project, A MAN MARKED TO DIE, a film that was meant to reenact the story of Agrarian Reform struggles leading to the assassination of the Peasant League leader João Pedro Teixeira in 1962. Featuring the leader's widow and their children, as well as people from a similar community, the film was never finished, and the crew had to flee. In 1981, Coutinho set about locating the actors, in order finally to narrate the history of the Peasant League up to 1964. The 1984 film radiates centripetally from the absence at the core of the interrupted film: its dead protagonist, the assassinated leader. Coutinho was haunted for years by the rushes hidden in a suitcase at a friend's. He admitted that the original film patronized and idealized the people but claimed to value the unfinished A MAN MARKED TO DIE precisely because of the participation of the organized rural movement. Besides its inordinate value as a record of a traumatic history, the film marks the passage from an idealized documentary representation to a testimonial, reflexive mode incorporating memory and commentary." –Ivone Margulies