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Made following the discovery of amateur footage shot in China in 1966 during the first and most radical stage of the Cultural Revolution, IN THE INTENSE NOW speaks to the fleeting nature of moments of great intensity. Scenes of China are set alongside archival images of the events of 1968 in France, Czechoslovakia, and, to a lesser extent, Brazil. In keeping with the tradition of the film-essay, they serve to investigate how the people who took part in those events continued onward after passions had cooled. The footage, all of it archival, not only reveals the state of mind of those filmed—joy, enchantment, fear, disappointment, dismay—but also sheds light on the relationship between a document and its political context. What can one say of Paris, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, or Beijing by looking at the images of the period? Why did each of these cities produce a specific sort of record?

Narrated in first person, the film reflects on that which is revealed by four sets of images: footage of the French students' uprising in May of 1968; the images captured by amateurs during the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of the same year, when forces led by the Soviet Union put an end to the Prague Spring; shots of the funerals of students, workers, and police officers killed during the events of 1968 in the cities of Paris, Lyon, Prague, and Rio de Janeiro; and the scenes that a tourist—the director's mother—filmed in China in 1966, the year of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

"A rich, immersive contemplation of the emotional battery life of revolutions... Examines 1968's turbulence in four countries through the prism of what its amateur documentarians filmed." —Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times

"Melancholy, inspiring and evocative." —J. Hoberman, The New York Review of Books

"Find solace, enlightenment and surprise in João Moreira Salles’s IN THE INTENSE NOW, a bittersweet, ruminative documentary essay." —A. O. Scott, The New York Times

"Deeply personal; a document of an incendiary time when hope, along with the stench of tear gas and gunfire, was in the air." —Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor