Postcards depict the colonisation of the Amazon jungle to build Fordlandia, a land of rubber and recklessness. Locals tell stories of the spirits and folklore that haunt the decimated landscape.
João is 13 years old and lives in the outback of Bahia. The arid landscape dominates everything. The bond between João and his father is broken. He has no friends and the people call him through the cruel nickname 'Son of Ox'. At the threshold of adolescence, João wants to escape from that place, where he does not seem to exist any possibility of he fit in. One day, a small circus arrives in the town. They are looking for a new clown. John is a silent boy, with an ingrained soul, and curiously, this make him the chosen one. At the circus, João develops a friendship with the Shaggy Clown, who encourages him to face his fears. 'Son of Ox' throws light on contemporary Brazil, revealing how the affections between men are woven in an extremely machist society, a universe of masculinity and discrimination, where is urgent to reinvent itself.
Vitalina Varela takes its title from the name of its lead actress, a Cape Verdean woman who, as per usual with Costa's non-professional actors, plays a fictionalized version of herself. Vitalina first appeared in an episode in the director's previous film, Horse Money (Wavelengths 2015), wherein she recounted how her husband had left their homeland nearly 25 years ago to work in Lisbon - a separation that became permanent when she finally arrived on the continent, three days after his funeral. In Vitalina Varela, Costa refracts and expands that episode to place us firmly within his heroine's stoic point of view, capturing her extraordinary strength and resilience as she navigates the scanty physical traces her husband left behind, discovers his secret, illicit life, and encounters the other lives that darken the shadows of the Fontainhas that once was.
Set in the near future, the film follows Teresa, who comes home to Bacurau, a village in Brazil's semi-arid sertão, to attend her grandmother's funeral. Upon her arrival, Teresa immediately observes signs that Bacurau is in dire straits. Basic amenities are in short supply, mobile-phone coverage is fading, clean water supply is dammed and the truck that brings potable water arrives riddled with bullet holes. It soon becomes apparent that the corrupt government has forsaken the village completely: not only has Bacurau been literally erased from the map, but its citizens are under attack. As the responsible close in, the villagers must prepare an organized resistance to avoid greater damage.
A 15-year-old Krahô boy called by his dead father's voice to celebrate the funerary feast which will allow his father's spirit to depart to the village of the dead. Reluctant to embrace what this implies, a first step in becoming a shaman, he flees to the nearest town, inhabited by white people. Whether Western civilization will offer him any solutions to his problems is, however, another question.