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"How Much she is Worth?" is a 2005 social justice film, in Portuguese, by the Brazilian producer, Sérgio Bianchi. The film loosely parallels the powerful 1906 Brazilian anti-slavery short story of "Father Against Mother (Pae contra mãe)" by the preeminent Brazilian author, Machado de Assis. In that classical tale, in order to stave off being forced by extreme poverty to turn over his new born baby boy to an orphanage to keep him from starving, the reluctant slave catcher, Cãndido, captured the pregnant escaped mulatto slave, Mônica and returned her kicking and screaming to her master for the reward, despite her protests that he would beat her. The reward money enabled Cãndido to keep his baby, but Mônica had a miscarriage and lost hers.[2] This film, jumps back and forth between the slave times of the late 1700s and modern day Brazil and has characters by the same name. Its object is to show that the "slave/master/desperate will do anything to survive poor" situation of the long gone slave days is now replaced with the "exploited poor/ruthless profit driven business/desperate will do anything to survive poor" of today and, in that sense, nothing has changed.[3]
Synopsis of the Film
[edit]Brazil was the last country in the western world to abolish slavery and it was a favorite topic of himself a mulatto, slave descendant, Machado de Assis. In Father vs Mother, Assis describes in vivid detail, and with considerable "tongue in cheek" irony, the devices and methods the slave owners used to keep their slaves in line. He particularly describes a metal mask that slave owners padlocked over the faces of their slaves to keep them sober and to keep them from stealing food. After describing such methods, he famously observed that "Not all slaves liked that," which gave rise to runaway slaves and the resulting slave catcher trade. Bianchi starts the film by showing a male slave in that metal mask and a female slave in stocks, observing that the slave shackled down that way could not bat away flies or attend to her physical needs (like going to the bathroom). The film shows a slave era episode when a white slave catcher steals the legally owned slaves of a freed black former slave lady. When she protests, confronting the slave catcher and waiving her ownership papers, she is fined for disturbing the peace and does not get her slaves back. The film then jumps forward to modern day Rio de Janeiro, to a group of black Brazilians, happily partying, giving the momentary impression that all is better now for blacks in Brazil. But, then the camera pans back and shows that the party is taking place in one of the many hillside slums of Rio, the so-called "favelas". As the movie develops, modern day Mônica is now the administrative employee of white publicists who use photos of poor children in advertising to raise money for the poor, but who really are, exploiting the supposed beneficiaries of their charities, by buying worthless goods (like outdated computers) for inflated prices and then hiding those resulting "profits" in secret bank accounts. From time to time in the movie of one scene after another of raising money by clever marketing and then misdirecting it away from the poor, there are flash backs to the comparable exploitation of slaves during slavery times, taken from the National Archives of Rio de Janeiro. One of the schemes of the marketers is to claim to be helping prisoners by giving them work, but they are really renting them out to businesses for a fraction of the cost of incarcerated labor. One of the former prisoners, who had been exploited that way, kidnaps one of the publicist and cuts off an ear, toe and finger every day until a huge ransom is paid for him -- his version of "redistributing the wealth." Mônica finds out about the fraud, confronts her boss about it and is fired. However, she leaves with all the information on the frauds and the secret accounts. So, the publicists hire modern day Cãndido, also a new, financially desperate father to kill her. He hunts her down and shoots, while she is begging for her life.