The Lion Has Seven Heads

Invoking Africa’s brutally violent and complex colonial histories in the film’s polyglot, hydra-headed title, Glauber Rocha transposes his radical allegory of oppression from the Brazilian backlands of his Cinema Novo classic Antonio das Mortes (1968) to the Congolese savanna. A white-robed preacher wanders and sermonizes across African lands; European communists and CIA spies conspire out of mutual self interest to engineer the appointment of an African bourgeois to a puppet government presidency; and a revolutionary group marches in exile.