It is Brazilian filmmaker Carlos Diegues’s gift to be able to create entrancing, sensual film epics from his country’s tumultuous experience. Diegues’s film Quilombo, a word referring to a community of free men, carries an echo of the original Quilombo dos Palmares, or Palm Nation, which was founded in the early 17th century by runaway slaves in the forests of northeastern Brazil. The legend of Palmares is presented in this movie as a sort of democratic utopia and remains an important symbol in a country that considers themselves to be ‘color-blind.’
While this film does tell the story of the rise and fall of the Palmares, Digues seems to move between dream and reality. The director combines historical battle scenes with the look of fantasy films. The movies’ costumes and sets, created by Luiz Carlos Ripper, are almost as if they are from another world. There are times when Quilombo de Los Palmares looks like a costume party, and there are interiors that look otherworldly. While the film may not seem like a traditional historical epic, it keeps a consistent tone. Unlike Desmundo that told the story of colonialism through a European female perspective, Quilombo tells its story through the lens of African slaves. Both, however, show their stories from unique perspectives not showcased in many Brazilian films. Quilombo seems to be a film about a society making up its own rules in a time before men knew all the answers. The message the director seems to be eliciting is that Brazil is still experimenting with that process.