Our green years (speaks a septuagenarian) were a gray and submissive world that the black and white image translates in the best way. I speak of a movie now premiered, Lavaganteby Mario Barroso: Never so strongly felt transported to the suffocating atmosphere of the 60s in our country.
There may be those who miss this time, especially those who did not live it. We can also consider that similar times can come there, now in color and with special effects. But I believe that to better understand our generation and the story that followed to him, the young people would win a lot to simply see and follow the plot of this movie.
One of the comments I heard on the way out of the cinema, of young people who had just to see the movie, was this: “They lived with an intensity that we no longer have.” Yes, the younger ones had political freedoms and freedoms of customs as a data acquired at birth. But they are wrong if they think that everything has been permanently achieved and that it is no longer necessary the intensity of collective emotions. As Thomas Jefferson taught, “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” And I do not know if we are measuring the current and immediate threats to our freedoms and if we are fully exercising the vigilance that should cost us the full enjoyment of these freedoms.
The most powerful on earth rule their countries in an autocratic and belligered way that make us want not to live in these countries. It is true that many brutalities that today say in public without shame were formerly practiced to it, under the veil of diplomatic hypocrisy. But the fact that he was the need to hide and conceal the brutalities and crimes of the powers manifested that there was still an ethical requirement of public opinion, which in democratic countries could lead to the falls of governments and dictatorships to revolts and even revolutions. But this ethical requirement was already a manifestation of that intensity, which many think is lost.
Fifty years ago, the paradise that our far right misses you, for from then on the misfortune would have only reign, has a sober and exact portrait in this movie, Lavagantewhich in itself is a lesson of history and political ethics.
Nothing must deserve greater combat than conformism and passivity in all violations of freedoms and guarantees enshrined in our constitution. Returning to live in a black and white movie, seen by the censorship commission, no!
Some readers may consider this text a paranoid manifestation of someone who sees giants in windmills and candidates for dictators in our friendly politicians of the far right. The public climate is of freedom of opinion and cerrado scrutiny of powers. Our parliament has not been set on fire or dissolved, parties do their campaigns normally, freedom of expression prevails and the balance of powers determined by our democratic constitution.
Maybe I had a dream, a nightmare. Maybe everything is fine and the delirium is in me. But why, when I see this movie, I felt so hard that this Portugal could come back, even with other clothes and another lighting?
Diplomat and writer