In the Intense Now

“A remarkable film, one of the biggest political essays of the contemporary cinema.”—Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema

Revisit the tumultuous revolutions of 1968—at times as if you were there—in this powerful, provocative work by revered Brazilian documentarian João Moreira Salles. Using startlingly fresh archival footage and offering uncommonly sensitive insights at every turn, In the Intense Now deftly moves between the student protests of May 68 in France, military takeovers in Czechoslovakia and Brazil, and through home movies that Salles’s mother filmed in China, Chairman Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. A triumph of the documentary form, Salles’s film is one of those rare works able to combine the personal and the political in such a sweeping-yet-intimate scale. As a Variety review noted, it’s “a haunting record of history made poetic...reminiscent of the films of Chris Marker.” (127 mins., DCP)