The final installment in João Pedro Faro's Cripta trilogy establishes the filmmaker as one of the most exciting figures working in the contemporary Brazilian experimental film scene. Cripta III is João working in his most free-form. Here, the viewer experiences an assault of shocking images from Brazilian porn films, an array of experimental music, and strange fetishistic scenes focused on horses. The end result is a nearly overwhelming experience as an inexplicable but searing vision of Brazilian porn historiography plays itself out on screen. The prevalence of horses as a symbol of sexual prowess in so many Brazilian porn films feels almost too strange to be true, but João, who is a veteran viewer of these works, embraces this strangeness and uses it to his advantage. Cripta III is João Pedro Faro's swan song to Brazilian cinematic porn. This third installment in the Cripta trilogy caps off one of the most exciting series of films to stimulate the way we approach and think about conventional Brazilian film historiography in recent memory.


