Pacarrete é forte como um mandacaru: protagonismo feminino, cinema e sertão

Abstract

Thinking about representations of the sertão from the perspective of female protagonism in the light of the film Pacarrete (Allan Deberton, 2019) led us to begin this search by understanding in what ways the sertão began to be transposed to the national cinema screens, starting with the Cinema Novo phase . Although the northeastern hinterland has always been present, producing cinema was part of the idealization of a modernized country that followed the new world trends. It was in the 1950s and 1960s that the crystallized images of the sertão were constructed, inspired by the regionalist novel of 1930. With the end of Cinema Novo, the theme of the sertão appears less and less in cinema to return along with the resumption in the 1960s. 1990. This time, the hinterland of drought, backwardness and colonels gives way to a playful hinterland, located somewhere between the past and the contemporary. There is no longer a single narrative. The hinterland multiplied. Thus, every time this sertão is read and said in the cinema, it appears from a new perspective. They are films that look like soap operas and television series, Road Movies, melodramas, happy and hopeless films. Narratives focused on just one character and their anguish. In contemporary times, the sertão of Cinema Novo still appears as an inspiration, but without a concern to maintain that way of representing and often in an attempt to build a narrative that surpasses the previously constructed one. In Russas, in the hinterland of Ceará, a retired ballerina dances and invites us to this party that is her hinterland of colors, lights and movement. The release of the film triggered a wave of audiovisual productions and the city of Russas-CE became the stage for different short films that, like Pacarrete, helped us to think about the female role in contemporary backwoods films.