Website: http://taigafilmes.com/omensageiro/index.html
Synopsis
Imprisoned in a military fortress during the dictatorship, in 1969, Vera meets a prison guard, Armando, who, faced with torture, decides to take a message to Vera’s family. Thus, he establishes an affective relationship with D. Maria, Vera’s mother.
Despite the horrors of the time, the film works on the possibility of a dialogue between two lonely and lost people, an upper-middle-class lady and a young man of rural origin who came from the south to serve in the army.
Today, Vera, at 70, is a professor at the university who debates with her students about politics, forgiveness and Hannah Arendt.
Director´s note
I think that the importance of “The messenger” lies in the actuality of its proposal. Despite being a film from the 1960s, it discusses contemporary issues such as polarization and justice. And it also shows that even in the midst of horror situations there are human beings who are sensitized. It is no wonder that teacher Vera wants to talk to her students about Hannah Arendt, the philosopher who lived through the horrors of nazism, and who watched and wrote about the trial and the conviction, in Tel Aviv, of the German Adolf Eichmann, a member of the Nazi SS and one of the main organizers of the Holocaust. Arendt did not fail to agree with her condemnation, but she wanted to deepen the question of the banality of the evil in which the entire German people was involved because of its compicity with Nazism.
For the character Vera, Arendt is important for thinking about the future of this people when she wrote: “If we are not forgiven, we are not released from the consequences and from the things we have done, our ability to act would be restricted, limited to a single act, from which it would be impossible for us to recover.” Which does not mean that there are no culprits who must be judged. In Brazil, until today, 38 years after the end of the dictatorship, no torturer has been brought to trial.
The film also discusses the impact of violence on those who experienced it up close. Is it possible for Armando to escape the perversity he experienced as a human being?