Published on September 1, 2022
Bruno Guaraná reviews the significance of the Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz’s groundbreaking Madame Satã on the occasion of the film’s 20th anniversary. Guaraná argues that Madame Satã was a film ahead of its time. While in dialogue with queer theory and queer cinema contemporaneous to it—placing it squarely within a global queer film canon—it also anticipated now-current notions of transgressive representations of nonbinary identities in Brazilian cinema. To think about Madame Satã in its original context thus means also recognizing the quantitative and qualitative leaps in media representation of queerness and blackness since its release.
Publication: Film Quarterly