Brazil

Brazil
USA, 1985. M - contains violence, 144 mins. 35mm.

In the first in a series titled ‘No Return Address’ we bring you an exciting week long season of Terry Gilliam's classic Brazil, screening every night at 7pm.

“If anyone ever doubts the visionary significance of Terry Gilliam's once bright genius as a filmmaker of enormous depth and cynical humor, you need only to visit upon his career-topping 1985 masterpiece of surreal satire, Brazil.

Co-written by Gilliam with Charles McKeown and Tom Stoppard, the story is an ingenious blend of sci-fi, political satire, and dystopic comedy. Jonathan Pryce gives his own career high performance as Sam Lowry, a kind of Peter Sellers surrogate searching for the woman of his sleeping dreams and working as a government bureaucrat drone at a soul-crushing job that resembles something out of George Orwell's 1984. Gilliam called the film, 'the Nineteen Eighty-Four for 1984' and sparks a fierce anti-consumerist flame with prescient pokes at things like plastic surgery and credit cards.” - Cole Smithey

And yes, Brazil is in the Film Archive collection. The Archive not only holds an extensive collection of New Zealand’s moving image heritage, but also houses significant historical content from around the world. In the past, films with worldwide distribution often ended their circuit in New Zealand and due to the expense involved in returning ‘to sender,’ our South Pacific nation was the 'end of the line' in terms of film distribution.

This means we now hold a collection of films which provide an international context to New Zealand production and cinema screening programmes of the past. These treasures also allow us to develop relationships with other Film Archives around the world to repatriate important titles to, and from, New Zealand.

Event listed by Film Archive

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