The Lion Has Seven Heads

Director: Glauber Rocha

1970 / 99min / DCP

Cinema Novo pioneer Rocha was in voluntary exile from his native Brazil, then under a military dictatorship, when he arrived in the Congo to shoot this coruscating, at times surreal anticolonial drama/screed, a series of striking, confrontational tableaux that unfold the tale of a white preacher of coming apocalypse (Jean-Pierre Léaud) who pits himself against a Latin American revolutionary fermenting African liberation, denounced by the clergyman an envoy of Satan. “An avant-gardist adventure that offers us a theater of absurdity and a theater of cruelty of an obviously Godardian sort… Has its own fierce, mad conviction, a bad dream being reconstructed by actors after the event.” —The Guardian