Paz e Amor

A carnival of celluloid dissent erupts when President Nilo Peçanha—thinly veiled as a silk-hatted hyena—parades through Rio’s arteries of power, his grin stitched from headlines and hubris. Laura Grassi’s anarchist seamstress unpicks his image thread by thread, sewing subversive slogans into the lining of every frock coat, while Maria da Piedade’s Afro-Brazilian street orator turns plazas into echo chambers of ridicule. Luis Bastos’ bankrupt coffee baron, drowning in worthless bonds, drowns the presidential anthem in a saxophone’s sarcastic wail, and Antônio Cataldi’s immigrant photographer freezes each farcical bow, flashbulbs popping like miniature revolutions. Between carnival confetti and parliamentary back-stabbing, the quartet orchestrate a slow-motion unmasking: the president’s peace-and-love mantra is silk-screened over bayonets, his signature dove morphs into a vulture on the edit table, and the final parade—shot from a rooftop—reveals the capital as a spinning zoetrope of empty slogans, its axis wobbling under the weight of its own hot air.