Cannes Best Director Winner Miguel Gomes’ Long-Awaited War Drama ‘Savagery’ Brought to Market by Luxbox (EXCLUSIVE)

Finally. First announced in 2020, “Savagery” (“Selvajaria”) the most ambitious and long cherished project of Cannes Best Director Award winner Miguel Gomes (“Grand Tour, “Arabian Nights,” “Tabu”) will be brought to market at next week’s Cannes Festival by Paris-based sales agency Luxbox where it will launch pre-sales.

One year after “The Secret Agent,” the Cannes Film Festival looks likely to have another high-profile title, if here a project, set in Brazil’s Northeast made by one of the most prominent voices in Portuguese-language filmmaking, Portugal’s Gomes, who scored a Cannes Festival Director award in 2024 for “Grand Tour.”

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Described as in pre-production, “Savagery” is set “against the hostile and surreal landscape of Brazil’s Northeast,” the synopsis runs. The film will be a “chronicle of a bloody war that took place in 1896-97 between the inhabitants of the hamlet of Canudos, led by their prophet, and the army of  the young Brazilian Republic,” Luxbox announced Wednesday. 

It adapts Brazilian author Euclides da Cunha’s “Rebellion in the Backlands,” (“Os Sertões”) considered by many a masterpiece and foundation stone of modern Brazilian literature. 

Few further details are currently known of the production, such as if it focuses entirely on the third and final part of Da Cunha’s novel, turning on the extraordinarily brutal war between the followers of religious leader and mystic Antônio Conselheiro, who preached to the poor and oppressed, and the Army of Brazil’s Republic, established in 1889. 

The title, “Savagery,” seems highly pointed, however. Da Cunha’s admired novel begins by describing the “sertanejos”, inhabitants of the northeast’s dirt-poor, drought-racked backlands, who were considered backward. Canudos, the village Conselheiro founded, was made up of mud huts, for instance. When Da Cunha describes how Brazil’s army puts down the rebellion, his novel raises the question, however, of who are the real savages. 

“Savagery” is lead produced by Portugal’s Uma Pedra no Sapato, behind “Grand Tour.” It is co-produced by Bubbles Project and Matizar Filmes (Brazil), Shellac Sud and Les Films a un dollar (France), Vivo Film (Italy), Lemming Film (Netherlands) and X Stream Pictures (China).

“Working with Miguel Gomes means embarking on an adventure. It means we will invent, yet again, a new way of making films. That we will take risks – and that once we set off, we can’t look back,” said Filipa Reis, the film’s producer at Uma Pedra no Sapato. 

“It is on a foundation of deep trust that we’re able to navigate the rough seas that Miguel stirs up. It means having the certainty—and the pride—of knowing we are part of something new, something never seen or done before. And that we are creating a new film that, 50 years from now, will still be found, rediscovered and studied,” Reis added. “It’s an exhausting process that makes us believe life is worth living. ‘Selvajaria’ will be no exception—believe it!” she concluded.

“Happy to have Fiorella Moretti and Luxbox with us. They appeared with such a level of enthusiasm and engagement that we felt immediately reinvigorated,” said Gomes.

“We are thrilled to be joining Miguel Gomes’s ambitious new project, ‘Savagery,’ alongside an outstanding team of producers. At Luxbox, Miguel Gomes’s films have long been a source of inspiration. Bold and visionary, he’s a director who continuously reinvents cinematic language and it is a true privilege for us to collaborate with him on this new film,” Luxbox noted Thursday. “‘Savagery’ delves into a powerful story of faith, war, repression and resistance.”

“Savagery” was included by the Locarno Festival in its 2020 Films After Tomorrow, a section which compensated projects halted or complicated by COVID 19. Its events and Euclides da Cunha’s book were the inspiration for Nobel Prize winner Vargas Llosa’s own novel “The War of the End of the World,” arguably his finest achievement. 

Chosen as a Variety’s Critic’s Pick, “Grand Tour” was described by Variety in a highly positive review as “enchanting, enlivening.” “Bristling with life and song and revelatory collisions between cultures and timeframes, the Portuguese master’s Cannes Competition title is a healing balm for trying times,” the review continued. 

“Grand Tour” followed Gomes’ film trilogy “Arabian Nights” (2015), a portrait of modern Portugal rave reviewed by some critics, and international breakout “Tabu” (2012), an Alfred Bauer and Fipresci Prize winner at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival.