Brazilian historical pageant, of dubious export value: too distant already to bear up under Carlos Diegues's "distancing" devices, and too propagandistic to have much intellectual appeal. It tells of a slave revolt on a 17th-century sugar plantation, sparked by the folk hero, Ganga Zumba, who was also the subject of Diegues's first film in 1963. (He looks here like a second-rate heavyweight boxer: too happy-go-lucky to submit to the regimen of trimming off that spare tire around the middle.) The rebels make off to an interracial haven in the mountains, where they can sing and dance, pick pineapples, turn cartwheels, do back-flips. Whites won't leave them alone, however, and the strife drags out through time-jumps of five, fifteen, and eleven years. Some good physical properties, including most conspicuously the actress Zeze Motta (star of Diegues's XICA), and some real howlers in the English subtitles: a typo on the very first letter of the prologue, and a translation of the caption "Janeiro 1694" as "January 1964." With Toni Tornado and Antonio Pompeo. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd
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