Three years ago, in the midst of a pandemic, a whole new generation “discovered” the sad story of Ângela Diniz with the Praia dos Ossos podcast, which rescued the femicide that stopped Brazil in 1976. The feature film, directed by Hugo Prata, features Isis Valverde in the title role and a negative reception at the Festival de Gramado, apparently due to a significant number of sex scenes throughout the story. The cast defends the work and complains about machismo, feminists complain about exploitation… almost 50 years later, there is no unanimity about Ângela Diniz.
Known as “the panther of Minas”, Angela was a typical woman of her generation. She married young, aged 17, and had three children, but when the marriage ended in divorce (there was no divorce), with only 26 years and a life ahead of her, she came to be seen as a morally “dangerous” woman. Her life as a “separated woman” was marked by violence and deaths, including, tragically, her own a few years later.
Living in Belo Horizonte and without custody of the children, who remained with her ex-husband, in 1973 her name ended up in the police news when the body of the caretaker and guard of her house, José Avelino dos Santos (aka Zé Pretinho), was found shot in the face, near the window, with a knife in his hand and his fly open with signs of ejaculation. To try to save the reputation of her boyfriend at the time, who was a married man, Angela initially took the blame, claiming self-defense, but it soon became impossible to hide the truth and Tuca Mendes claimed to have fired the shot, also in self-defense.
Faced with the murder scandal, a woman who was not married to a married man at home, and the real circumstances of the crime that were never clarified, the rumors that she had an affair with the victim quickly gained strength. Tuca was sentenced to two years in prison with probation, which ended up being released from Justice.
Lacking the mood to stay in the city, Ângela moved to Rio de Janeiro, where she gained the “nickname” of Pantera de Minas and went to the most popular parties in the city. At the end of 1974, she was involved in a new scandal when, while visiting her children in Minas, she decided to bring her daughter with her without notifying her ex-husband, who denounced her for kidnapping, even though the girl returned to Belo Horizonte in a week. . The penalty was six months in prison. Hell continued when the following year an anonymous tip led to a police raid on her home for drugs, and the socialite had to admit to being “addicted to drugs” to escape arrest for possession of more than one hundred grams of marijuana found in her residence.
In this trajectory surrounded by scandals and drama, Ângela met Doca Street (Gabriel Braga Nunes), from São Paulo, with whom she was in Búzios, in the house rented by the two in Praia dos Ossos. Everyone testified that the relationship was marked by domestic violence and Doca was very jealous, reinforcing the macho image of “indomitable” that Angela would come to have for many years. Everyone condemned her because he would have “abandoned wife and children for her”, but still she was not faithful to him. In December 1976, the two were officially in Búzios to escape the hustle and bustle of Rio, however, on the night of December 30th, they fought so badly that Doca left the house. When he returned hours later, they argued again and he killed her with no fewer than three shots to the face and another to the back of the head. Your argument? Defense of honor.
Although he was on the run and in hiding for weeks, he didn’t turn himself in until almost a month later, with public opinion on his side. Her trial, in 1979, exposed Angela’s life as that of a wanton woman, responsible for everything that happened. Doca was sentenced to 18 months in prison (with an additional six months for running away), but as he had already served a third of the sentence, he was released, leaving the courtroom a free man. The feminist movement embraced the cause against him, and the motto – who loves does not kill – emerged at the time, as the sexist society claimed that the murder “was for love”. The pressure ended up provoking a second trial two years later, then sentenced to 15 years.
For many years there was an intention to take the life of Ângela Diniz to the cinema (the series Quem Ama Não Mata aired in 1982 and Linha Direta reconstructed the crime and the trial), but only now, in the wake of the success of the Praia dos Ossos podcast that came out of paper. In 2006, in his biography, Doca Street, he again insisted on his vulnerability and possessiveness, as justifications for having temporarily lost his reason. It is a pity that our cinema cannot tell this story properly. Not even the advance of time changes the negative perspective on the life of a young woman, who was silenced for not following the pattern of the time. The film opens on September 7th.
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