Bacurau

; ) is a 2019 Weird Western film written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles. It stars Sônia Braga, Udo Kier, Bárbara Colen, Thomas Aquino, Silvero Pereira, and Karine Teles. The film, a co-production between Brazil and France, revolves around Bacurau, a fictional small town in the Brazilian sertão that is beset by strange happenings following the death of its matriarch, Carmelita (Lia de Itamaraca), at the age of 94. The film was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, and won the Jury Prize. Plot In the near future, the people of Bacurau, an impoverished, rural settlement in the fictional municipality of Serra Verde, in western Pernambuco, gather for the funeral of Carmelita, an elderly woman seen as the matriarch of the community. Her granddaughter Teresa, now a young woman, returns to town after many years for the occasion, and to deliver some medicine. In the following days, the village experiences a sequence of strange events, including the town inexplicably disappearing from online maps and satellite images, loss of mobile phone signal, sightings of a UFO-shaped drone and an unnamed couple from southern Brazil passing through town on motorcycles. There is an ongoing dispute over water rights from the local river, with water being dammed upstream in a corrupt scheme masterminded by the wealthy mayor of Serra Verde, Tony Junior. He visits Bacurau in an attempt to secure its residents' votes in an upcoming election with old food and tattered books, but no water; the townspeople all hide to avoid him. A tanker truck of water finally arrives for the town, but it has been riddled with bullets. When horses stampede through town, two local men are sent to investigate the nearby farm from where they presumably escaped and find the family that owned it murdered. As they attempt to leave the property, they too are murdered, by the southern motorcyclists. This couple then meets up with a group of mostly American foreigners led by Michael. The couple is chastised for killing the two men, as killing them deprived the foreigners of two chances to score "points." After receiving unheard instructions through earpieces, the foreigners kill the couple and then argue over who earned the points for their deaths.