Filme

The documentary addresses an episode that took place almost 15 years after the end of the Canudos War. With similar proportions and meaning, the Contestado War broke out in a region of southern Brazil whose ownership was disputed by the states of Paraná and Santa Catarina. Across an expanse of land equivalent to the state of Alagoas (25,000 km²), for more than four years, between 1912 and 1916, an estimated population of 20,000 backlanders faced the forces of the government and the region’s prevailing coronelismo, in a conflict that came to involve 80% of the Brazilian Army. At the end of the conflict, Paraná and Santa Catarina signed an agreement definitively establishing their borders. And it was at the height of these struggles that, for the first time in Brazil’s history, the peasant masses expressed a clear awareness of the need to guarantee their “right to land.” The animation of virtual cameras over photographic records, illustrations, and rotoscoped drawings on period documentaries provides the visual elements needed for a detailed reconstruction of the sites, characters, and events of the conflict. The main photographs used are by Claro Jansson, a photographer hired by the Lumber timber company, who recorded key moments of what became known as the “Holy War of the South.”