A man with too many names kidnaps a newborn and disappears into the dense vegetation of a mountain town in northeastern Brazil. The gang he was working with collapses behind him. Now it is just him, the child, and the ghosts that put him on this path in the first place.

That is where In the Clown’s Hand picks up. The film is the first chapter of a planned trilogy from Brazilian writer-director Daniell Abrew, and the larger story behind it has been forming for more than a decade. “In 2010, I started developing the first drafts of six interconnected films, a hexalogy that follows the childhood, adulthood, and old age of a character named Diogo Abner Brugada, a captain in the Brazilian Army,” Abrew says. “After his wife disappears, he enters the criminal underworld in an attempt to understand the people responsible and find a way to reach her. What begins with smaller crimes gradually turns into a profound loss of identity, as he becomes a feared and respected figure within that world, while never abandoning his central goal: to find his wife.”

Augusto, a man of many masks

The character gets the nickname “The Clown” from the police because of how often he changes names. The Brazilian title is also a phrase. “In Brazil, the expression ‘na mão do palhaço’ can suggest being trapped in a situation that has slipped out of control, being at the mercy of chaos,” Abrew says. “It carries the sense of being vulnerable to forces that no longer obey reason or order.”

The clown reference goes further than slang. In traditional circus language, the Augusto is the awkward, impulsive, chaotic figure, paired against the “white clown” who represents order. The film has two characters named Augusto and Branco. The pairing is on purpose. “Their names echo the classic contrast between the Augusto clown and the white clown, which creates an underlying metaphor connected to circus language and imagery,” Abrew says. “For me, the clown is a deeply human figure: someone suspended between tragedy and absurdity, vulnerability and menace.”

A 3.5-hour first chapter

The film runs 211 minutes. That length was a decision, not an accident. “The film’s duration grew naturally out of the depth of the character and the breadth of the world surrounding him. When I first began developing this universe, I found that the material generated by the character’s arc was much larger than a single film,” Abrew says. The original six-film hexalogy got compressed into a trilogy, and each chapter now carries the density of nearly two features.

“I was less interested in adjusting the story to a commercial runtime model and more interested in allowing the film to breathe according to its own internal rhythm. I have always been drawn to long-form cinema, especially when duration becomes part of the experience rather than just a measurement.” The next chapter, already in development, is called On the Fox’s Trail. The third and final film will be On the Razor’s Edge.

Why Ibiapina

Abrew grew up on his grandfather’s farm in the rural area of Quixeramobim, in Ceará, and the original plan was to shoot there. The land is open. The vegetation is low. The sertão landscape did not give him what the character needed. “Quixeramobim, with its sertão landscape, lower vegetation, and more open space, would not give me the sense of enclosure I needed.”

Ibiapina did. Abrew was working on another production passing through the nine municipalities of the Serra da Ibiapaba when the place changed his mind about where the Clown lived. “Some of them gave me the exact feeling that Augusto, ‘The Clown,’ could disappear into that environment and exist there in a believable way. In the middle of one production, I found myself deciding that the next film had to belong to that place. Ibiapina was the first place where I truly felt myself inside the character of the Clown.” The result on screen is a landscape that does the work of a second protagonist. “The landscape is not just a backdrop in the film; it becomes part of the psychological condition of the story.”

VHS textures and dirty images

The look of In the Clown’s Hand is not clean, and Abrew traces that directly back to Brazilian Cinema Marginal. The movement, also known as cinema de invenção or udigrúdi, emerged in Brazil from the late 1960s into the mid-1970s in dialogue with and in rupture from Cinema Novo. “I have always been deeply drawn to its freedom, its irreverence, its embrace of excess, and its willingness to expose Brazilian violence and contradiction through parody, grotesque imagery, fragmentation, and a deliberately impure visual language.”

That spirit shaped the texture. “It is one of the reasons why In the Clown’s Hand embraces VHS textures, dirty images, visible imperfections, abrupt tonal shifts, and a style that does not try to hide its own rawness,” Abrew says. “In a way, that aesthetic is not just visual; it is ethical. It comes from a cinema that refuses polish when polish would betray the truth of the world it is portraying.” The deepest reference for him is Rogério Sganzerla’s The Red Light Bandit (1968), but the influences also pass through Steve McQueen’s Bullitt (his father’s favorite) and the modernist crime structure of Point Blank. All of it filtered through 1980s Brazil and the cold climate of the Serra da Ibiapaba.

The accident that rewrote the ending

The hardest sequence in the film was the final confrontation, and not for the reasons Abrew expected. During the climactic gunfight, a fragment from an explosive effect struck his right eye and he lost consciousness. “I came within millimeters of losing sight in that eye. We had to stop filming for about two weeks until I could recover enough to return.”

The original ending had to be rewritten. “The original ending of the film was different, but because of the accident and the production schedule, I had to incorporate the injury into the film itself in order to complete it on time. That affected me very deeply, because it changed not only the physical process of shooting, but also the emotional meaning of the ending.”

When he came back to set, the cast he needed for the larger confrontation was no longer available. So he shot what was left himself, with the technical crew, carefully designing eyelines and blocking to fake the presence of actors who could not return. “That moment affected me more than any other in the film because it was not only about acting as the character. It also demanded that I think simultaneously as director, editor, and producer, while dealing with physical pain and uncertainty.”

What to know before you press play

“In the Clown’s Hand is not just a crime film,” Abrew says. “It is also a story about identity, loss, survival, and the possibility of humanity emerging in the most unexpected places. It is a long film, but its duration is part of the experience, it gives the characters, the atmosphere, and the emotional tension time to unfold. I would invite the viewer to enter the film with patience and openness, because beneath the violence and the darkness there is also tenderness, contradiction, and a very human search for meaning.”

By Relay

www.pickrelay.com