After “Central Station”, which won him the Golden Bear in Berlin, one of the greatest Brazilian filmmakers of all time, Walter Salles (The Motorcylce Diaries, Linha de Passe, On the Road) has made another striking drama. This social drama set in rural Brazil in 1910 was translated to us as “Blood Revenge”, while the international title of the film was “Behind the Sun”, and it is interesting how Salles and co-screenwriter Karim Anouz found motivation in an Albanian novel. It is about the book “Broken April” by probably the most important Albanian writer of all time, Ismail Kadare, in which he dealt with the centuries-old tradition of blood feuds in the mountainous regions of northern Albania in the thirties of the 20th century.
Salles moved the plot to the wasteland of northeastern Brazil at the beginning of the 20th century, where two families who have been feuding for generations live. And while the Breve family is a poor, farming family that still refines sugar from cane in the old, primitive way and barely survives even though they work hard from morning to night, the rival Ferreira family are respectable and wealthy landowners. Those two families have been fighting over the land for generations, and that fight and competition have long since become terrible, and blood revenge is the way they function. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, is the motto under which these two families function, if necessary until they kill each other to the last.
This blood revenge, or an eye for an eye, will last until we are all blind, observes the mother of 20-year-old Tonho (Rodrigo Santoro) from the Breve clan, who is now in line for blood revenge. It is his duty to avenge the death of his older brother and kill the man from the rival family who took his brother’s life. The rule is that the truce lasts until the blood on the shirt of the deceased changes color and turns yellow, and then the action begins. Although Tonho is not thrilled with the idea that now it is his turn to take revenge, pressured by his father to carry out an assassination, this will mean that he is now the next target.
His life is numbered and he is aware of it, but Tonho will try to break this cycle of hatred and cruelty, and we follow this whole shocking, tragic and sad story from the perspective of his younger brother. A boy who apparently doesn’t even have a name and everyone calls him a kid because they are aware that his fate is predestined and that at some point his time will come to be a killer, and then be killed. And that poor boy, who actually never moved beyond the village where they sell sugar, is actually the central figure of the film. That boy with an unbreakable spirit seems to encourage Tonho to become a dreamer and start fantasizing about a different life and escape from that unimaginable poverty, cruelty and predestined fate.
He recorded Salles “Abril Despedecado” in a naturalistic, realistic style, and yet it is so poetic, touching, melancholic and emotional. And while we understand how difficult and arduous life is for the Breve family, which offers no rewards, this generational hatred and persistence that continues with murders for years until they all kill each other, is something that is impossible to understand. So Tonho will find himself torn between his duty to his family, his desire to please his father by sticking to tradition, but also his desire to live. He wants to have some new experiences and to feel life outside of that miserable farm and away from that poor village, but it will unfold in a very different way. This film was nominated for Bafta and the Golden Globe for the best film outside the English-speaking world, and Salles continued to pave the way for many of his compatriots, such as Fernando Meirelles and Jose Padilha, who soon raised Brazilian cinema to an even greater level and presented it to the world.