Neighboring Sounds

Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho

2012 / 131min / DCP

Mendonça Filho’s narrative feature debut, largely shot in the director’s own home and around the quarter of Recife that he grew up in, Neighboring Sounds—a film whose title suggests its meticulous sound design, which plays no small part in creating a sense of mounting ambient anxiety—is a slow-burn drama of collective communal unease and rankling resentments, in which a group of area residents band together to hire security as a buffer against the sinister have-nots they imagine waiting to ransack their little redoubt. “Burrows deep to expose the unarticulated though ever-present sense of dread gripping its bourgeois characters… What Mendonça Filho demonstrates so potently is the psychic toll exacted by the elite’s refusal to directly address Brazil’s pervasive class imbalances, as the affluent immure themselves in well-appointed spaces tricked out with surveillance cameras.” —Melissa Anderson, Artforum

Distributor: The Cinema Guild

Q&A with director Kleber Mendonça Filho moderated by Dennis Lim, Artistic Director of the NYFF, on Saturday, November 22nd