Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho • 2012 • Brazil
Starring Irandhir Santos, Gustavo Jahn, Maeve Jinkings

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s masterful debut feature is an unsettlingly incisive study of class and simmering urban unrest in contemporary Brazil that unfolds with the gripping, slow-burn tension of a thriller. On a quiet city block in the coastal city of Recife, ruled by an aging patriarch and his sons, a recent spate of petty crime has rattled the nerves of the well-to-do residents. When a mysterious security firm is brought in to watch over the neighborhood, it sparks the fears and anxieties of a divided society still haunted by its past.