Narcissus Off Duty

Fifty years after his 1968 arrest by Brazil’s military dictatorship, Tropicália legend Caetano Veloso looks back at this experience, reflecting on traumas past and present. An intimate portrait of the artist’s incarceration as he recalls painful memories and performs songs that marked his imprisonment is at the same time a delicate study on storytelling, with an austere quality: just one man sitting cross-legged on a chair in front of a concrete wall – prompts us to exclude all that is unnecessary in order to concentrate on the essential. In the words of the executive producer of the film, director João Moreira Sales, “one must refrain from movement; one must be quiet and listen. The telling is all.”