"It's Not the Time to Cry" covers the same theme as Haskell Wexler's documentary "Brazil: A Report on Torture", with a slight
similar presentation of facts. Both documentaries deal with Brazilian political prisoners, living on exile in Cuba, sharing their
traumatic stories of dealing with beatings, pyshcological and physical tortures on the arms of the military personnel who were against
the young leftist students/activists considered as subversive figures in the context of Brazil's military regime (1964-1985).
It goes
with interviewing those five students/workers, presenting themselves, details of their arrest and exact descriptions of the forms of
torture they endured. They group (composed of two women and three men) were political prisoners exchanged during the wave of kidnapped
foreign ambassadors (the American Charles Elbrick, in 1969; the Swiss Giovanni Enrico Bucher, in 1971), one of the few times the
established tough government conceded with terrorist activities and complied with their demands, sending the prisoners to live abroad.
With the exception of Maria Auxiliadora Lara Barcellos (codename Lara), who committed suicide in Germany, in 1976, the other four returned
to Brazil during amnesty in 1979 and later on were deeply committed in political causes, becoming estalishment figures themselves.
There's also an unidentified male who re-enacts part of such tortures, with an improvised pau-de-arara (parrot
perch), use of sticks and electric shock chords - in Wexler's film the prisoners re-enact the acts themselves in an almost non-chalant
manner, remembering their sufferings but also telling the world how things really were in those prisons.
The impact/importance on this particular film was a little lessened on me due to already had seeing the forementioned film by the
Oscar winning cinematographer, a better project by all accounts; and also as there isn't much of a personal view from the analyzed
figures as to what do they dream about Brazil, the ways of changing things in the political/social aspect or what they'd dream of
doing in the future. It sticks with showing the horrors of it all, and luckily they survived. Highly commendable and greatly informative, it
gets a praise for that, and it's quite possibly that the audiences who hadn't see it yet will be impressed with everything shown. 7/10.
