Lead and the horror of slavery imposed by large landowners on an entire quilombola community in the Pantanal.

The voices of 16 women punctuate the hour and ten-minute account of the cruelty of a sugarcane farm and its alcohol plant that enslaved an entire community in the rural area of ​​Poconé (MT), in the Pantanal region of Mato Grosso. The documentary "Chumbo" (2022), by director Severino Neto, brings to the screen the horror of conditions analogous to slavery, child prostitution, hunger, and all sorts of humiliation experienced by the community of the same name.

“Chumbo” is able, through the accounts of the interviewees and the images that frame them, to lay bare the horror experienced by the community while simultaneously showing lightness, poetry, and resignation. It's a punch to the gut. And it is, especially for me, as a reporter and editor at the time for Cuiabá's main newspaper, A Gazeta, having covered numerous events unfolding there and not possessing the capacity to fully grasp all that horror.

Hence the importance of a documentary, of cinema. I always mention that a documentary is, in essence, a great report. It is. However, cinema extends our perception and inflames our sensitivity to the point necessary to understand, in perspective, the facts and to go beyond the curtains. Especially the cinema of Severino Neto, with its strong and essential content and social context.

The Quilombola community of Chumbo is one of 42 existing in the Pantanal region of Mato Grosso, distributed across the municipalities of Poconé, Barão de Melgaço, Nossa Senhora do Livramento, and Santo Antônio de Leverger. For almost 20 years (from 1993 to 2012), Alcopan, an alcohol plant and its sugarcane plantation, exploited the entire community. It established a system of forced labor by not paying wages, keeping men, women, and children in inhumane conditions, and allowing children and adolescents to be forced into prostitution.

The hardships were so intense and incessant that cases of suicide and dementia occurred. Hunger amidst the abundance of the farm deepened the cruelty. So much so that the community still lives today, as can be seen in the accounts in the final part of the film, with a kind of "Stockholm syndrome," praising the presence of Alcopan ten years after the end of that two-decade period of slavery.

For almost all the women interviewed, Alcopan wasn't all that bad. To illustrate, they mention, among other things, the fact that all the bad things that existed during its time still persist. They ignore, perhaps, in my opinion, that it was the sugar mill that brought the problems to the community, which can't get rid of them.

Alcopan was forced to close in 2012 precisely because of a lawsuit filed by the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office, which accused it of maintaining conditions analogous to slavery. 

The images that Severino Neto brings to the screen possess the delicate warmth of those Pantanal landscapes and the routine of the interviewees, alternating with the coldness of black and white as their conversations unfold. It is there that violence, not only in a physical but also emotional sense, surfaces, showing the complete disintegration of the human, albeit with poetry and moments of humor from the characters. All of them, incidentally, delicate and cheerful, hopeful. 

It's impossible not to cry. One of its most impactful moments is the only male narration, in voice-over, framed by a disturbing animation. There, it's also possible to feel the cruelty of some of those oppressed human beings who cannot overcome the horror they live through and abandon their most vulnerable. They either flee or kill themselves, as one of the women recounts at the beginning of the film.

Young director Severino Neto has a considerable body of work in documentaries and fiction. One of his most successful films, "The Battle of Shangri-La," his first feature film, co-directed with Rafael Carvalho, is available for rent on Apple TV, Claro + TV, Vivo Play, Google Play, and YouTube.

“Chumbo” is still touring festivals in Brazil and abroad before being offered to streaming platforms and cinemas.