What does Brazilian cinema tell us? What does Brazilian cinema tell us about black actresses and actors? ‘Pressed, Ripped Apart’, a film by Fabio Rodrigues Filho, makes use of archival sources to retrieve the trajectory of black actresses and actors who, between absences and delimited presences, between the fallacy of a racial democracy – based on the harmony among Brazil’s diverse identities – and an erasure of identity, strain the history of Brazilian audiovisual and above all, our own history.