Friendly Fire

Director: Beto Brant
Screenwriters: Marçal Aquino, Beto Brant, Renato Ciasca

Institute History

  • 1999 Sundance Film Festival

Description

Often young filmmakers use a lot of guesswork to prepare scripts and characters and when viewing the finished product, the audience says, “Ah, the work of a young filmmaker.” Quite the opposite is true of twenty-nine-year-old writer/director Beto Brant, who just last year dazzled international audiences with his assured and riveting first feature, Belly Up. Now Brant brings us Friendly Fire, a thrilling and equally complex work in which techniques apprenticed in his previous film—particularly flashbacks to build character and camaraderie under the duress of violence—are displayed with the confidence of a seasoned auteur.
The time is now, or is it? Four middle-aged men are rounded up by ringleader and newly elected politico Miguel to go fishing in the country. Seemingly bourgeois, well groomed and educated, the men are in high spirits until Miguel reveals his true motivation—the identification of and revenge upon a capitano who tortured them all after a thwarted bank robbery.
From here on, the film divides itself between past and present: days of revolution in the early 1970s and a weekend of coming to terms with horrifying memories thirty years later. The four ex-revolutionaries have maintained successful lives, yet all have been emotionally stunted by this trauma. The scene in which the men finally come face-to-face with their nemesis is brilliantly shot and paced: Brant wisely chooses a gruesome, timeless activity—a cockfight—to foreshadow past and future as the men
confront shattered dreams and the futility of a violent future.

Beto Brant, Director
Beto Brant was born in 1964 in Brazil and graduated from Faap’s movie school in 1987. He made several short films, which receive awards in Brazil and at other festivals, His debut feature film, Belly Up, was acclaimed by both Brazilian and international critics and featured in the New Directors, New Films series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Friendly Fire is his second feature.

— Andrea Alsberg

Screening Details

As you use our Online Archives, please understand that the information presented from Festivals, Labs, and other activities is taken directly from official publications from each year. While this information is limited and doesn't necessarily represent the full list of participants (e.g. actors and crew), it is the list given to us by the main film/play/project contact at the time, based on the space restrictions of our publications. Each entry in the Online Archives is meant as a historical record of a particular film, play, or project at the time of its involvement with Sundance Institute. For this reason, we can only amend an entry if a name is misspelled, or if the entry does not correctly reflect the original publication. If you have questions or comments, please email [email protected]