Morte e Vida

“My name is Severino.

We are many Severinos.

We all have the same life.

Even though we are equal Severinos in life,

we die the same death.

The death of a Severino.”

Excerpt from the poem „Morte e Vida Severina“ (1955) written by João Cabral de Melo Neto. Severino, one of hundreds of thousands of people from the Brazilian north-east Since centuries they have have to give up everything and get on their way to survive somewhere else. Natural catastrophes, extreme drought, poverty, low life expectancy, lawlessness and the daily struggle for naked survival forces these Severinos to emigrate. But every step along the way is accompanied by disappointments. Any attempt to establish a better life failed. Whether as a day laborer on the huge latifundia and sugar cane fields or as one of millions of inhabitants of the shanty towns in the city: Everywhere, they remain interchangeable and superfluous. A marginalized and faceless shadow of society. The film „Morte e Vida“ consists of the observations portrayed by the poem „Morte e Vida Severina“ the ""postcolonial"" society with its people and Brazilian landscape.