Corpo ("Body"), the feature debut of directors Rossana Foglia and Rubens Rewald, is the best Brazilian fiction I've seen in quite awhile. It's an elegantly crafted meditation on the bloody residue left behind by the military dictatorship of Brazil's past, focusing consciously on the present and those who occupy it, both living and dead.

In Corpo, bones are unearthed in an unmarked grave in present-day São Paulo along with the mysteriously preserved body of a woman who has been dead for almost 30 years. In an attempt to discover the identity of this woman, forensic doctor Artur (Leonardo Medeiros) encounters young actress Fernanda (Rejane Arruda), who has an uncanny resemblance with the cadaver. But when Artur searches through archives of prisoners during the dictatorship, he finds the dead woman shares names with Fernanda's (still alive) famous sociologist mother. Something isn't right.

Though Artur's need for the truth despite apathy or outright resistance from his peers (embodied by his boss Lara, played with relish by Chris Couto) is fairly standard in a story about crimes of the past, Corpo defies genre by resisting answers or the illusion of closure. What happened before is impossible to truly understand; what matters are the distortion and discrepencies we live with now. And yes, at the center of all this is the human body, raw, erotic, political: signs of torture and a blue ring mark the unknown cadaver, simultaneously exposing her ideology and her vanity.

Corpo is vague enough that it invites repeat viewings to really understand what happens. Thankfully there's more than enough meat on its bones to justify a closer look.