Divine Love
UW Cinematheque 821 University Ave., UW Vilas Hall, Room 4070, Madison, Wisconsin
press release: Brazil | 2019 | DCP | 101 min. | Portuguese with English subtitles
Director: Gabriel Mascaro
Cast: Dira Paes, Julio Machado, Antonio Pastich
Brazil, 2027. In this evangelical conservative nation, a puritanical notary imposes her morality on couples seeking divorce, forcing them to stay together through a Kafkaesque web of bureaucracy. Her own fertility issues lead her towards a new, couples-only church with a decidedly hedonistic liturgy. Filmed in lustrous electric neon hues and set to a synth wash, this sexually explicit vision of the near-future posits a disturbingly sleek dystopia.
LACIS Film Series 2020: In March, our annual series supported by the University’s Department of Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies brings you two new visionary dystopian features from Brazil (Bacurau and Divine Love), as well as two restored Mexican productions from the 1950s (the 3-D period action movie Sword of Granada and Luis Buñuel’s The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz). Special Thanks to Alberto Vargas and Ruth Llana Fernandez.