Brazil’s sci-fi adventure thriller Bacurau was widely received as one of 2020’s best films, heralded as a new high-water mark in a growing wave of class-conscious filmmaking. The film, directed by Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho, has been favorably compared by critics to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, and the two Recife-born filmmakers have have not shied away from using their celebrity as a soapbox to hold forth on political issues. Given the timing of its release, it was also inevitable that commentators would frame Bacurau as a kind of anti-Bolsonaro manifesto. Notwithstanding the anachronism (Bacurau was filmed before Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 victory), there is a grain of truth to the description.

Just as well, Bacurau is nearly unclassifiable. Critics fumbled to express what they found so compelling, although they seemed to agree that part of what made the film so effective was that it took Brazilian society, in all its complexity, and turned that reality into an estrangement device. Casting Hollywood’s familiar genre conventions against the backdrop of the parched and impoverished Sertão, the underlying inequalities and injustices of the region lend a sometimes-unbearable intensity to the film’s otherwise familiar sci-fi and Western tropes. But the Sertão, located in Brazil’s historically underserved Northeast, is more than just backdrop.

Since the start of their careers, Dornelles and Filho have made it their business to put the Northeast at the center of the national cultural map. With the success of 2016’s Aquarius and especially with 2019’s Bacurau, they drew the region into the international spotlight, causing consternation among Brazilian conservatives.