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disobedience as decolonial insurgency in the movies Sugar (2017) and Property (2022)

Abstract

Based on the short story Casa Tomada (1995) by Julio Cortázar, this article aims to analyze and relate two Brazilian films from the last decade: Sugar (2017), by Renata Pinheiro and Sérgio Oliveira, and Property (2022), by Daniel Bandeira. Although the time gap between the publication of the literary short story (released in 1946) and the films is considerable, the connection between the works occurs primarily through three aspects taken from the short story: the big house, the income that comes from the fields, and the “invading noises” that take over the house. It is through the symbol of the taken house in the short story that the article intends to discuss the decolonial insurgency present in both films. Thus, through this association, this article seeks to highlight decolonial characteristics in the works, which invite the viewers to position themselves in the face of conflicts linked to the historical differences of a colonial past marked by the split between the “Casa-grande” (house where the masters of slaves lived) and the slave quarters (Freyre, 1999). In this way, both films present “burning images” (Didi-Huberman, 2012) aiming to produce a “cosmopoetics of disobedience and the common” (Ribeiro, 2016), since they promote critical thinking about the Brazilian colonial past and aim to invert the colonial perspective.