The gathering of images captured by Glauber Rocha and Affonso Beato during the March of the 100 thousand on late June 1968 is an incredible view
on the ground of the events as they were unfolding. A large protest of students and artists against the military regime and its brutal policies that at
that time were on a rampage - three months earlier, the student Edson Luís de Lima Souto was killed by the police in a cowardly act and with each new
protest conducted by the students movement the repression fell hard on them. Following the example of the incredible May '68 of the inumerous Paris protests
against De Gaulle, the example that came on the following month was one of the biggest and most significant events of opposition to the regime. Later on, by
the end of that year the AI-5 came along and the law was the most repressive ways to silent everybody with its restriction of press, freedom of expression and
violence became the rule with the military.
"1968" isn't much of a complete film; it's silent and a little random at parts. It's a pity since it'd be interesting to hear the loud voices from
the crowd, specially student leader Vladimir Pereira then a rising and important figure of the students movement and the little time he appears in two
sequences you get sense that his speech was a very inflamatory one. But what makes this a project filled with greatness is in seeing how large protests could
also be peaceful ones - you don't the police or the military following them in an exhausting and threatning manner, though it could have happened on certain
parts not captured by the filmmakers - and you can sense how the youth of '68 was idealistic, positive despite the dark outcome of everything they were living
and would have to live for almost 20 years more until the regime's end. I wonder how such positive notion came that things could change and that such demand was valid
since everything was violence and brutality. It got better, it got worse...
Whatever it was the idea coming from the heads of Cinema Novo master Rocha and cinematographer Beato, truth is that for a sort of incomplete film, this
one end up being one of the most important documents from an important period in Brazil history. It's not like seeing something from a news crew since almost no
press was there, and even if they were, they couldn't broadcast it. This is a legitimate guerilla filmmaking at its greatest. 8/10.
