A personal and historical filmic essay about the intensely dramatic political landscape of the late-1960s, João Moreira Salles' In the Intense Now (No Intenso Agora) moves between his family history, notably the holiday movies shot by his mother on a visit to Maoist China at the time of the Cultural Revolution, and a wide range of archival footage recording some of the student-led protest movements and quasi-revolutionary events that nearly turned the world upside down in the summer of 1968.  
 
In the Intense Now provides an original perspective on the much-celebrated Parisian student protests – so often presented as the epicentre of a global earthquake of strikes, demonstrations and riots that spread across Europe and the world in the late 1960s. Salles' essayistic account of the period approaches the topic from a number of different angles, starting with his personal fascination with the beautiful colour images his mother filmed while holidaying in China in 1966, and intertwines his family’s experiences in Paris in the late 60s with accounts of key political moments of the decade, including a military coup in his native Brazil and the Soviet Union’s crushing of the Prague spring.