THE RED LIGHT BANDIT

The centerpiece of the radical underground Cinema Marginal movement, THE RED LIGHT BANDIT, is an electric, legendary movie written and directed by 21-year-old Rogério Sganzerla that defiantly attacked Brazil’s sociopolitical morals, gleefully subverted the rules of narrative cinema and has lost none of its power to shock, disturb and delight.

Based on police reports of the real-life bandit who terrorized ‘60s São Paulo, a charismatic crook (Paulo Villaça) robs the rich, taunts law enforcement and becomes a public hero in an anarchic odyssey that’s equal parts crime thriller, urban western, grindhouse roughie, twisted comedy, cultural grenade and still unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Helena Ignez co-stars in this hallucinatory and amazing manifesto now presented in 2K, newly restored by Severin Films from the original camera negative!

“My film is a western about the Third World. That is to say, a fusion and blending of various genres…a western, but also a musical, a documentary, a cop film, a comedy (or is it slapstick?), and science fiction. It has documentary honesty (Rossellini), the violence of a cop film (Fuller), the anarchic pace of a western (Sennett, Keaton), and the brutal simplification of conflict (Mann).” — Rogério Sganzerla