Man Marked for Death, Twenty Years Later

In 1964 Coutinho was shooting the feature film On the Death List in northeastern Brazil, using farmworkers as actors to tell the story of farm labor leader João Pedro Teixeira, who was brutally assassinated in 1962. Filming was halted by a military coup. Twenty years later Coutinho “finished” the film in a most remarkable way, shifting his focus entirely from the life of Teixeira to the paths that his family and compatriots in the peasant leagues took since 1964, thus making Coutinho’s film a profound contribution to what one Brazilian critic called “documentary filmmaking as the practice of life.”