Alma no olho (Soul in the Eye), a short film directed and performed by Zózimo Bulbul in 1973, constitutes the inaugural gesture of black cinema in Brazil. Bulbul’s status as a pioneer for Black Brazilian cinema does not reside in historical chronology, because he was not the first Black Brazilian director: Jose Cajado Filho, Haroldo Costa, and Odilon Lopes were his predecessors in that lineage. His importance lies, rather, in the aesthetic and narrative advances accomplished by his film, which has survived its ostracism—imposed by Brazilian critics and cinema studies through an exclusionary hegemony of almost forty years—to be taken up again as a reference point by a new generation of Black Brazilian filmmakers. [...] In recent years, many analyses have been carried out in the field of black cinema studies on Alma no olho, largely devoted to its historical relevance, leaving the inventiveness of its aesthetic gesture somewhat in the background. Frequent note is made of the film’s inspirations: the script draws from Soul on Ice, the 1968 book by Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver about his time in exile, and the soundtrack consists of music from the album Kulu Sé Mama, the 1965/67 collaboration by Juno Lewis and John Coltrane, to whom Bulbul dedicates the film. In Alma no olho’s eleven minutes, Bulbul performs a pantomime of the history of Black people between Africa and the diaspora, tracing a saga that begins with a state of freedom as lived on the African continent, passes through the hardships of the Atlantic slave trade, and finally ends with the breaking of all the chains of colonial domination that continued to imprison black bodies and minds in the period following the Abolition—the end of the transnational slave trade, in 1888, in Brazil. On-screen, only his black body, some objects, and a white background are present for most of the film’s duration. While the performance is under way, the character played by Bulbul faces the camera at different moments, sometimes in complicity, sometimes with irony, but always defiantly. (Source: Oliveira, Janaína. "With the Alma no Olho: Notes on Contemporary Black Cinema." Film Quarterly, vol. 74, no. 2, Winter 2020, pp. 32–38, doi: 10.1525/fq.2020.74.2.32.)