Ruy Guerra was born in Mozambique and went to film school in Paris. He did much of his early film work in Brazil, becoming one of the founders of Cinema Novo. Even though his first film, OS CAFAJESTES (1962), a key document of Brazil's cinematic renewal and the manifestation of a major directorial talent, was never publicly shown in Britain, his second film OS FUZIS (1963) was immediately recognized as a landmark and turning point. It succeeded in achieving the seemingly impossible: to present a fiction that is unambiguously political in its impact, articulated by means of a linear narrative that loses none of its dialectical logic for being cast in the mould of strict documentation. By contrast, SWEET HUNTERS (1969) met almost everywhere an uncomprehending audience, unprepared for a film that made no reference to cinema novo or Latin American politics.

Using behavioral realism against itself, so to speak, in order to demonstrate the inescapably social nature and class character of apparently spontaneous behavior or of an emotional gesture, Guerra has been able to work within the mainstream tradition of the fiction film, while radically subverting the ideological context of that tradition. His films do not stop at reinstating the political dimension which Western narrative art over the past two centuries had carefully eliminated from its psychological and interpersonal picture of human existence, but – conscious no doubt of his responsibility towards a Latin America, which he made his second home – he creates, notably in THE GODS AND THE DEAD (1970), the necessary climate of action. There, magical and mythological forces can assume the role of shaping values and structuring moral responses, indicative of the determining power of the imagination, which any political analysis ignores at its peril. Ruy Guerra still seems exemplary because he stands on the front line of directors capable of making the narrative cinema yield a complex and analytical filmic discourse whose reflexivity and cinematic intelligence underscore a political urgency rather than relativizing his commitment to action.