“Reminiscent of the films of Chris Marker, it’s a documentary that’s really a meditation—history made poetic. An immersive and highly personal film; hypnotic in its provocation." —Variety

Please join us for a Film Screening and discussion with the Director, João Moreira Salles
Moderated by Princeton Professors Pedro Meira Monteiro, João Biehl, and Germán Labrador

New York Times Review, January 30 2018

In the Intense Now explores the revolutions of 1968 as they unfolded across four different countries and their political environments: France, Czechoslovakia, China, and Brazil. Narrated in first person by the director, the film reflects on that which is revealed by footage of the French students’ uprising in May of 1968; the images captured by amateurs during the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of the same year, when forces led by the Soviet Union put an end to the Prague Spring; the scenes that a tourist — the director’s mother —filmed in China in 1966, the year of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution; and footage from Salles’ own childhood in Brazil, during the establishment and rule of a repressive military dictatorship.

Brazilian documentary filmmaker João Moreira Salles was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1962 and studied economics at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. In 1985 he and his brother Walter Salles founded the production company VideoFilmes, which went on to produce modern Brazilian classics like Central Station (1998) and City of God (2002). As a director, Salles has maintained a steady output of incisive social documentaries. These include America (1989), which won Best Journalistic Program from the São Paulo Art Critics Association; Blues (1990), which won the Special Jury Prize at the Festival International du Film D’Art in Paris; and Santiago (2007), which won Best Documentary of the Year by the Brazilian Film Academy. Since 2006, Salles has published the monthly magazine piauí, which is devoted to long-form journalism. In the Intense Now is his first release in a decade.

"Remarkably resonant and personal." —Owen Gleiberman, Variety
“A remarkable film, one of the biggest political essays of the contemporary cinema.“ —Javier Porta, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema (BAFICI)

This event is sponsored by the Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and The Humanities Council 1968/2018: Cities on the Edge series; the Department of Spanish and Portuguese; the Department of Anthropology; and the Program for Latin American Studies. The film is part of Princeton's Brazil LAB (Luso-Afro-Brazilian Studies) initiative.

Film Credits:

Title: In the Intense Now Original title: No Intenso Agora
Total Running Time: 127 minutes
DCP Image: HD, Color, 1998x1080, 2K Flat, 24FPS
Encoding: JPEG2000/INTEROP Audio: 5.1
Production country: Brazil
Subtitles: English subtitles
Director: João Moreira Salles
Producer: Maria Carlota Bruno
Sound: Denilson Campos
Music and Sound Design: Rodrigo Leão
Editor: Eduardo Escorel, Laís Lifschitz
Year: 2017
Production company: VideoFilmes