Fans who caught the news a few months back that Coffin Joe (or Zé do Caixão, as José Mojica Marins is known here in Brazil) was coming out of retirement to shoot a new film will be happy to know that production has wrapped up last month on A Encarnação do Demônio (The Embodiment of Evil, or more precisely, The Embodiment of the Demon). An interview recently published on Brazil’s newspaper Folha de São Paulo has the details.

With a budget of 1.9 million reais, A Encaranação do Demônio is Marins’ most expensive film yet, and the final part of the trilogy that began with À Meia-Noite Levarei Sua Alma (At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul) and continued with This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse (Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver). It’s also the most violent film Mojica has ever directed, one that he says almost pushed him past his limits and left the film crew disturbed:

“People saw tortures. The following day, more tortures. Night would fall, and if there weren’t tortures, there would be scenes with spiders, rats. The scene with the cockroaches was the most incredible. The one who acted in the scene was my partner, Neide. They brought in a trainer who swallowed the cockroach and brought it back up to the mouth.”

Other colorful scenes will have Marins himself being covered with live spiders and kissed by a specter whose mouth is crawling with real worms. Marins says he had access to people who could provide him with real flies, but didn’t have to use them: “I didn’t need to put flies on the dead bodies, because my dead bodies don’t last for a long time. They go straight for the dogs to eat.” It seems that age has not diminished Coffin Joe’s charm.

Marins says he was surprised with the crew’s technical prowess, and that technology has really gone a long way since the last time he directed a film, leaving him disoriented but also amazed. It’s been twenty years since Marins previous film, but A Encarnação do Demônio will not be his swan song. According to Marins, this is definitely not the last we will see of Coffin Joe.

Official site

Interview (Folha de São Paulo, in Portuguese)

O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias translates into English as “The Year My Parents Went on Vacation”. This title would perfectly describe what director Cao Hamburger’s second full-length film is all about, if it weren’t a euphemism for “The Year My Parents Went Hiding for Fear of Being Captured, Tortured, and Killed by the Military”. But you try telling that to the kids.

This is one of the few Brazilian movies in this year’s São Paulo International Film Festival that has been meeting almost universal acclaim. There’s something in it that eloquently speaks to peoples’ memories of the military dictatorship Brazil had to endure from 1964 to 1985. Since most of the audience lived through the dictatorship, or at least part of it, as kids or adults, O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias certainly struck a nerve. But international audiences will probably be just as pleased with this sad but charming coming of age story.

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