IN THE INTENSE NOW

A decade after the superb documentary Santiago, Brazilian director João Moreira Salles returns to the screen with an enigmatic and powerful film that combines archives of May 1968, amateur films captured during the Prague Spring, and his mother’s personal footage of a trip to China during the Cultural Revolution. Now the filmmaker has brilliantly edited this disparate material into a personal essay about the camera’s ability to do justice to seismic historical events. At once personal and analytical, melancholic and critical, In the Intense Now questions the true value of the audio-visual documents that became part of the world’s collective memory.