Emicida: AmarElo - It's All for Yesterday

It's a history class, about brazillian music evolution from samba to rap and brazillian black people fight through last hundred years, very strong emotional material. The editor really shine on this, is a must watch.

So subtle, delicate. Such a great way of speaking about the rights of black people in Brazil for such hard and controversial theme. Beautiful arrangements for presenting Rap and Hip Hop with great elegance inside the Teatro Municipal, which is a grand Theater in São Paulo, Brazil, venue for the Week of Modern Art in 1922. This guy is a poet and knows how to tell a story. It doesn't matter if you never listened to rap, watch this!

I reckon for those really into (brazilian) music, this will feel way better than what I rated. I had no clue who the titular "character" is - but since it was on Netflix and let's keep it real, what else is there to do ... I gave it a shot. You should at least have a knack or love for music in general and hip hop ultimately too.

But that is not all the documentary shines a light on - we get to see an evolution - how and from where the music scene got to where it is today. Fascinating and really enticing ... for some more than for others.

'Amarelo' means yellow in Portuguese. But AmarElo - a pun on the words 'love' (amar), 'yellow' and 'link' (elo), as if to say that love is the bond that ties us up - is one of the most important albums in recent Brazilian discography. Giving birth to the idea of a 'neo-samba', the album-that-became-an-essential-doc fuses styles and tells the story (tells the history) of the foundation (and oppression) of black culture in Brazil. Emicida - an unparalleled artist, a genius - roams through the samba-capoeira-candomblé universe to find out who we are and what we have become (cultural and politically) - and to root his album and his origins. It's undoubtedly one of the most important movies of the decade, 'cause it rewrites what Brazilian elites have always tried to erase: that we are a country built on black blood; that we are a country that has appropriated black culture for years; that we are a country that has silenced black artists, black philosophers, black writers for centuries. But not anymore. Emicida has come to put an end to this. It's a movie about respect. It's a movie about visibility. It's a movie about reconstruction. But it's definitely a movie about love. Above all - love for those who came before us; love for the gods from Yorubá culture; love for our ancestors. It's all about what we may become if we fight this fight as one. Linked. In (through) love.

The movie "Emicida: AmarElo - It's All for Yesterday" is a documentary about the creative process of Emicida's studio project AmarElo and his performance at Theatro Municipal de São Paulo in 2019. While preparing the show, Emicida reflects on the past 100 years of Brazilian history from the perspective of black people, focusing on his home state of Sao Paulo. Through his music and performance, Emicida explores the legacy of colonization and its impact on the black community in Brazil. The documentary is divided into three parts: Planting (Plantar), Watering (Regar), and Harvesting (Colher). In each part, Emicida sheds light on the racist injustices that white people have inflicted upon the black population. He does this through a combination of interviews, old TV footage, animated sequences, and music, lots of it.

This is a powerful and impactful documentary that reveals, scares, and wakes us up to the reality of social injustice in the middle of the 21st century. The movie is particularly striking when Emicida brings together two very marginalized groups by performing with drag queens, delivering a powerful song that encapsulates the message of the entire film.