Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury
2013 · Luiz Bolognesi · Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice each era painted in a completely different palette. (light)
Earthy greens and ochres mark the pre-colonial world, harsher tones mark slavery and dictatorship, and a desaturated, neon-tinged grime marks the 2096 future.
Payoff: You know which century you're in from the color alone, before a single date is given.
Watch for the hawk soaring above the landscape between eras. (camera)
The immortal hero's hawk form supplies the film's widest view, an aerial vantage that carries the eye and the story from one century into the next.
Payoff: The bird's-eye view is the film's way of arguing that all four centuries are one long history.
Notice a gesture or face echoed in a different century. (cutting)
The editing draws rhymes across the four eras, answering an act of violence in one period with its echo in another.
Payoff: The four eras start to feel like one recurring conflict wearing different costumes.
Watch each era stage the same kind of confrontation. (staging)
Warrior against warrior, the enslaved against the master, protester against the state, the thirsty against the guardians of the water: each era composes its own version of one standoff.
Payoff: The powerful keep changing costume, but the shape of the confrontation never actually changes.
Listen to one voice narrate across all six hundred years. (sound)
The immortal hero's first-person voiceover binds the four eras into a single confessional account, spare dialogue giving way to the cadence of oral storytelling.
Payoff: One continuous voice is what makes four separate centuries feel like a single lifetime.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the color of each era, not the plot. The palette is doing the historical work.