General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20268 min read

Behind the Sun

Behind the Sun (Portuguese: Abril Despedaçado) is a 2001 drama film directed by Walter Salles, a Brazilian, French, and Swiss co-production shot in Portuguese. Set in the Brazilian badlands of 1910, it follows Tonho, the middle son of a poor farming family, who is ordered by his father to avenge the death of his older brother in a generations-old feud with a neighboring clan, and who begins to question the cycle of violence when a small traveling circus passes through the region.¹^•² The film is freely adapted from the 1978 novel of the same name by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, transplanted from its original Balkan setting to the northeastern Brazilian sertão.³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Abril Despedaçado; international title Behind the Sun¹
Director and producer	Walter Salles; produced by Arthur Cohn¹
Countries and language	Brazil, France, Switzerland; Portuguese¹
Source	Ismail Kadare's 1978 novel Abril Despedaçado, the third screen adaptation of the book³^•⁴
Setting	The Brazilian northeast in 1910, where the Breves and Ferreira families are locked in a revenge feud¹^•⁵
Principal cast	Rodrigo Santoro (Tonho), José Dumont, Rita Assemany, Ravi Ramos Lacerda, Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos, Flavia Marco Antonio¹
Festival and awards	Competed for the Golden Lion at the 58th Venice Film Festival, winning the Little Golden Lion; nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2002 Golden Globes and BAFTA⁶^•⁴
Reception	Metacritic metascore 73; Rotten Tomatoes 74% from 46 reviews; ranked 58th best Brazilian film of all time by Abraccine⁷^•⁸^•⁴

Spoilers

Story and source

The film opens in April 1910 in an arid stretch of the Brazilian northeast. Tonho (Rodrigo Santoro), the middle son of the Breves family, is ordered by his father to avenge the death of his older brother by killing a son of the rival Ferreira family. He knows that if he commits the killing, his life will be divided in two: the twenty years he has already lived and the few days left before the other family takes its revenge. Urged on by his younger brother Pacu (Ravi Ramos Lacerda), he is torn between fulfilling his ancestral duty and rebelling against it. The cycle begins to break when a tiny traveling circus, made up of a clown (Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos) and his fire-eating stepdaughter Clara (Flavia Marco Antonio), passes near the family's land.¹^•⁹

The feud between the poorer Breves family and the wealthier Ferreiras, who occupy what was once Breves land, follows a set of ground rules: one man from each family is killed in turn, then a truce holds until the blood on the dead man's white shirt, hung on a clothesline, turns yellow in the sun, after which the killing starts again.⁵^•⁹ The bloodstained shirt on the line is the film's first image and its central symbol of natural timekeeping within the cycle of revenge.¹⁰^•⁹

The adaptation. Salles read Kadare's novel in 1998, around the release of his earlier film Central do Brasil, and said he chose it because he could not forget it after reading it three years earlier.¹¹^•¹⁰ The screenplay was written by Salles with Sérgio Machado and Karim Aïnouz.¹ In research for the film, the team found points in common between the Albanian vendetta tradition and the law of vengeance in the Brazilian Northeast.¹¹ Kadare advised Salles to immerse himself in Aeschylus before making the film, and Salles described the result as a reflection on violence, a universal theme, noting the similarity between the situation Kadare described in the Balkans and conditions in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century.⁹^•¹⁰ After seeing the finished film, Kadare called it magnificent, adding that the two earlier adaptations of his novel had failed.⁴

Production

Filming took place between July and September 2000 in the interior of Bahia, in the towns of Bom Sossego, Caetité, and Rio de Contas, with a crew of more than fifty people.¹²^•¹¹ An AFP report at the time of the Venice premiere instead located the exterior shooting in the state of Ceará; the two accounts disagree on the state.¹⁰ According to that report, the film cost two million dollars, was shot entirely in exteriors in difficult climatic conditions with a crew of about twenty, many of them inexperienced, and the team traveled 200 kilometers daily to return to lodging in temperatures generally around 40 degrees Celsius.¹⁰ SensaCine lists a production budget of 9,000,000 USD, a figure that conflicts with the AFP report.¹³

Engineering the landscape. Production manager Marcelo Torres, who spent about a year on the film, described three signature challenges. The story required a sugarcane field in a region with almost no fertile land or sufficient water, so the crew had to create the conditions for the crop to grow. The swing tree, one of the film's most striking images, was found about 250 kilometers from the location, cut into three parts, transported, and rebuilt on site with large bolts and a solid concrete structure so that it looked natural on screen. The bolandeira, an animal-powered cane mill, was recovered from an old structure of which only three quarters survived; the crew rebuilt it as a genuinely working machine that ground cane by animal traction, with a team of oxen adapted to the set.¹⁴ Chase scenes through the caatinga, the region's dry scrubland, were shot in extreme heat over difficult terrain and long distances.¹⁴

Walter Carvalho was the cinematographer, Isabelle Rathery the editor, Cassio Amarante the art director, Cao Albuquerque the costume designer, and Antonio Pinto, Ed Cortês, and Beto Villares composed the music.¹ As in Terra Estrangeira and Central do Brasil, Salles mixed professional and non-professional actors, preparing the cast with assistant director Sérgio Machado and actor Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos.¹² Folha de S.Paulo reported that the mill sequence was directly inspired by Vladimir Carvalho's documentary A Bolandeira, and that the final scene, in which Tonho walks straight through the sertão to the sea, reproduces the ending of Glauber Rocha's Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol.¹⁵

Release and awards

The film premiered in competition at the 58th Venice International Film Festival in September 2001, where it contended for the Golden Lion and won the Little Golden Lion.³^•⁶ It was released in Switzerland on 13 December 2001, in the United Kingdom on 8 March 2002, in Brazil on 1 May 2002, and in other European markets through 2003.¹ Although it was Brazil's official submission for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the 2002 Oscars, Brazilian audiences had to wait until 2002 to see it in general release; it played for one week in a single Salvador cinema in October 2001 to qualify for the Oscar selection.⁴^•¹⁶ It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at both the 2002 Golden Globes and the BAFTA awards, and won Best Director for Salles at the Havana Film Festival.²^•⁴

Reported running times differ by source and version: Cineuropa lists 106 minutes, the Zaragoza film archive 105 minutes, the Australian classification record and the US licensor 92 minutes, and Roger Ebert's review 91 minutes.¹^•¹⁷^•¹⁸^•⁵

Reception and place in Brazilian cinema

Critical response was broadly favorable. The film holds a Metascore of 73 on Metacritic, with 15 of 19 critic reviews positive and none negative, and a 74% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes.⁷^•⁸ Reviewers singled out Carvalho's cinematography and Antonio Pinto's score; the Los Angeles Times praised the film as poetic and uncompromising, and Variety described it as consummately crafted and stunningly shot in Brazil's remote northeastern badlands.⁷ Roger Ebert, reviewing it in 2002, called it a blood feud elevated to the dignity of tragedy while finding its fascination with the families' bloodlust trying.⁵ The Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus describes it as visually poetic and a powerful statement about cycles of violence.⁸

Standing in Brazilian film. Abraccine, the Brazilian association of film critics, ranked it the 58th best Brazilian film of all time.⁴ Scholars place it within the resurgence of northeastern subjects in Brazilian cinema of the 1990s and 2000s, alongside films such as Eu, tu, eles and Guerra de Canudos, and note that Salles transposed a Balkan story into a region whose own traditions of vengeance gave the material local grounding.¹⁹^•¹¹ The Independent's Jonathan Romney judged the transplantation effortless in appearance but argued the film played into marketable ideas of world cinema and lacked the specificity of contemporary Latin American work such as Amores Perros.⁹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2000s › Biographical and historical drama films 2000s › Released 2000 to 2005

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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