Memories of Prison

Nobody tells the novelist Graciliano Ramos (Carlos Vereza) what he is charged with, only that the state has decided he is a communist sympathizer. In the 1930s he is taken to the Ilha Grande prison, held alongside common prisoners and treated no better. Nelson Pereira dos Santos adapts Ramos's own memoir of the Estado Novo dictatorship, and the film's plain argument is that a government afraid of a writer's words will take the man before it reads them.