Rocha proclaims an “aesthetics of hunger”: rather than hiding the poverty of the Nordeste, he places it at the centre, turning it into raw material.​

For a long time, cinema had to admit something shameful: it didn't know how to look at Black skin. Official history has relegated this observation to the realm of technical problems, gamma curves, and capricious emulsions, but the way lighting is configured always reveals something about how we hierarchize bodies.

In the recent history of African cinema, nothing comes from nothing: every shot, every voice-over, every ellipsis seems to respond to a sentence written long before the camera arrived on the continent. Between the page and the screen, a dense conversation has unfolded for decades, debating a simple and inexhaustible question: what can be shown and what can only be told?