Official selection
Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival, NatFilm Denmark, Sitges Film Festival , MoMA NY Retrospective, Cinematheque Francaise
Director
Jose Mojica Marins
Writer
Jose Mojica Marins, Magda Mei
Cast
Nivaldo Lima, Jose Mojica Marins, Magda Mei
Producer
Ilidio Martins
Cinematographer
Giorgio Attili
contact
ONE EYED FILMS
Director José Mojica Marins and his creation, the iconic Coffin Joe (a loose translation of Zé do Caixão), are inextricably linked by a legacy encompassing several films – including the official ‘Coffin Joe Trilogy – comics, and television shows. The director only stepped into the role in the first place because the original actor cast for the part got cold feet, pulling out just days before shooting. Now, it would be impossible to imagine anyone else as Coffin Joe; the idea for which came to the director in a dream.
Taking everything he owned and with the help of his father’s savings, Marins bought his own studio, an abandoned synagogue, and set about making Brazil’s first horror film. His vision was truly unique, employing Nietzschean defiance, the confrontational aspects of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, the surrealism of Buñuel, the blood and gore of Grand Guignol theatre, the shadows of Expressionism, and lashings of the Gothic grotesque, in addition to some local superstitious flavour.
And so it was that Coffin Joe, cultural icon, countercultural statement, sadistic lord of carnival horror, was born. This first installment sees Marins take up the role of the atheist gravedigger with a penchant for savage violence, who wishes to populate the world with others like himself, as he feels the current state of mankind is flawed and inferior. The film stands out for its fabulously bile-spitting philosophical leanings, which seem to hit back at the political and religious oppression inherent in Brazilian culture at the time it was made, even if Marins was never an overtly political filmmaker in the conventional sense of the word. – Kat Ellinger
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