Uncork'd Entertainment has announced the U.S. theatrical release of The Cannibal Club (O clube dos canibais) by Brazilian up-and-comer Guto Parente (Inferninho)—a razor-sharp political satire that smartly integrates shock and horror to offer piercing social commentary on Brazil’s deep-seated structures of race, class, and paternalism.
Having world premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival last year, the Brazilian production opens on Friday, March 1 in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall and in San Francisco at The Roxie, followed by other U.S. cities, and a VOD release on March 5.
Set in the northeastern city of Fortaleza, The Cannibal Club follows Gilda (Ana Luiza Rios) and Octavio (Tavinho Teixeira), an über wealthy couple and members of Brazil’s ruling class, who have their special kink all worked out: manipulative sex and the cooked flesh of their economically and racially-marginalized hired help.
Delightfully scathing, the film reveals Gilda and Octavio as members of an elite club of similarly privileged couples partaking in the same cannibalistic hobby. When Gilda accidentally discovers that the leader has a larger secret, her and Octavio's futures hang in the balance.
Parente has produced a world in which Brazil’s very richest think they are unassailable, laugh and boast about infidelity, and murder at will with impunity—all while complaining about the poor masses that wander their nation’s streets. Locked up in their ivory tower, the irony is that their philosophy and resulting behavior isn’t, in fact, so far from reality—of course, sans the flesh-eating.
Winner of the Best Director Award at the 2018 Brooklyn Horror Film Festival and hailed as a" “a nicely nasty caricature of Brazil's ultra-decadent [and] ultra-wealthy” (Neil Young, Hollywood Reporter), Parente’s second solo feature reflects Brazil’s fast-growing scene of politically-charged genre flicks and marks him as a whip-smart filmmaker to watch.
