WINNER: Best Feature, Adelaide Film Festival
Critics Award, Hamburg Film Festival
Best Film, Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival
Special Jury Prize, Venice Film Festival
“exudes hormones from every pore” Peter Debruge, Variety
Neon Bull takes us straight into a world that has little room for refinement. Powerful bullflesh,
crammed into narrow wooden gates, dominates the screen in the opening scenes, set in the
holding pens of a provincial stadium where the rodeos known locally as Vaquejadas take place.
A bull is unleashed, and two mounted horsemen flank it as it charges out until one of them is
able to grab the beast’s tail and bring it crashing to the ground.
Set in Brazil’s northeastern provinces, Gabriel Mascaro’s tale of an odd family that tours the
local rodeo shows with a truckfull of bulls is an unexpected delight, at times as carnal, sweaty
and instinctive as its main characters but also playfully original and thoughtprovoking. The
tough, tender story impresses thanks not only to its sometimes dreamlike mise en scene, but
also the way it plays with the gender expectations of a world which turns out to have a
fascinatingly nuanced turbulence beneath its rippling macho surface.
Lee Marshall, Screen Daily
