Sightlines · reception
How The Given Word was received
1962 · Anselmo Duarte · The Given Word on Sightlines
The arc
It won the Palme d'Or in 1962 — still Brazil's only one — yet the young Cinema Novo crowd back home sniffed at it as too polished and theatrical next to their radical new wave; decades on it's been fully re-embraced as a cornerstone of Brazilian cinema.
What’s debated
The eternal Brazilian film-nerd fight: is it a genuine masterpiece or the 'safe, well-made' film that got the international glory Glauber Rocha and Cinema Novo were denied?
Its footprint
In Brazil it's shorthand for a promise you'll keep no matter the cost — 'pagador de promessas' entered the language — and the image of a man hauling a cross through Salvador is one of the country's most reproduced movie images.
Where it stands
A 'you must have seen this' of Brazilian cinema — the answer to the trivia question 'which is the only Brazilian film to win the Palme d'Or?' — though far less watched internationally than the Cinema Novo films it outshone at the time.
Did you know? It beat Antonioni's L'Eclisse and Bresson's The Trial of Joan of Arc to the 1962 Palme d'Or, and went on to become the first Brazilian film ever nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.