Isabel Ribeiro
After diving into a shallow lake, a college student becomes tetraplegic. In his wheel chair, he remembers the important facts of his life as an adolescent.
The story of two couples - Xico and Olga, Tuca and Dina - through 20 years of friendship, from adolescent dreams to maturity frustrations. They meet in a small town in the State of São Paulo, but one of the couples decides to try their luck in the big city. As background, the political events in the 60's and 70's, and how they affect their lives.
Director Leon de Winter has taken a thriller with political and psychological overtones, and scrambled it into a series of vignettes that are mixed-up in time and in location, thereby dashing any hope of following the story. A journalist goes to a southern European country to interview a well-known terrorist who has refused to stop his activities even though the revolution he fought for ended successfully five years earlier. Questions are raised about adopting violence as a way of life without at first realizing it and about the seeming impossibility of raising the consciousness of backwater cultures. Perhaps because of the way the story has been filleted into fragments, characters like the journalist and terrorist do not have enough continuous screen time to build up their individuality, a second factor that makes it difficult to become involved in the drama.
It's Christmas Eve and an aunt and her nephew have to deal with their platonic relationship.
Rio de Janeiro is a city of very well defined contrast between the seafront, narrow, where the rich live and very close, the hills with their slums, where life changes very quickly in the short space of time.
Count Dracula, taking on the new identity of Vladimir, leaves Transylvania and goes to Brazil in search of his son Rafael. This vampire romance was conceived to be a potential telenovela, but only ended up running as a TV miniseries with four installments because the network that financed it went under.
Documentary on famous Brazilian actresses, female directors and the role of women in Brazilian film history.
In the beginning of the 20th Century, in the Northeast of Brazil, one of the first Brazilian industrialists is persecuted because he refuses to sell his business to a British company.
An accident at a construction site, resulting in one death, sets one worker off on a struggle for justice that exposes the mechanisms of exploitation and the class relations of a country that had undergone one decade of fast-paced ‘conservative modernisation’ at the hands of the military. As a sort of sequel to the classic The Guns (1964), following the fate of those characters as they move from enforcers of exploitation to exploited, it offers more than a snapshot of the period: the correspondent time lapses in fiction and reality capture the passage of a chunk of Brazilian history between the two films, and, therefore, also the transformations in cinematographic approaches to the social and political between the two moments. Equally daring in content and form, and in the originality of the adequacy of one to the other, it won the Silver Bear at Berlin.
A rich, spoiled young man encounters a prostitute and gets confused about the nature of his feelings for her. He can't decide between attraction and repulsion.
The critical success in France of How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman made possible dos Santos’ delirious science-fiction vision of free love in a post-apocalyptic wilderness besieged by flesh hungry zombies contaminated by an unnamed nuclear attack. Who is Beta? follows two statuesque survivors drawn irresistibly together only to be entranced by the arrival and sudden disappearance of a third, the bewitching raven haired Beta. With its cartoon-like depiction of extreme violence and desire, Who is Beta? offers a heady Pop-infused companion to Hunger for Love. Yet beneath its giddy play of surfaces, dos Santos' underappreciated film gradually reveals a darkly ambiguous metaphoric dimension. -Harvard Film Archive
The story of Paulo Honório, a poor ploughman who becomes a rich farmer. Obsessed by his desire to get even richer, he doesn't pay much attention to his wife, Madalena, a teacher who reacts against his tyrannical ways.
An allegory about Brazil's history and the struggle for power since the 1930 Revolution until the advent of the TV.
In another literary adaptation – this time Machado de Assis’ novella O Alienista – and his first color film, dos Santos unleashes an extravagant, maddening excoriation of Brazil’s military dictatorship of the 1970s. As usual, the director exploits all cinematic constituents in his palette – a radically intrusive and discordant soundtrack, non sequitur editing, exaggerated camera angles and all manner of carnivalesque pageantry – to illustrate the tale of a doctor/priest on a mission to discover truth through the study of madness. The population of his asylum grows as his definition of sanity fluctuates until it finally threatens to incorporate the entire town. The film’s own irrational reversals and allegorical codes gleefully mock the arbitrariness of authoritarianism in all its varied guises. -Harvard Film Archive
Wealthy banker Antônio witnesses the murder of a journalist, who got killed for exposing the activities of a gang of smugglers. After they find out about him, Antônio and his wife are both targeted and pursued by the criminals.
University student who works in a bank experiences a personal crisis: he is torn between his ambitions and the temptation to engage in the armed movement against the military dictatorship of the time, in Brazil. At the same time, his love life is also confusing: he is unable to choose between two girls: an apolitical rich one, whose main interest is her own sexual liberation; and a working girl with family problems.
Directed by Eduardo Coutinho (segment "Pacto, O"), Rodolfo Kuhn (segment "Noche terrible"), Helvio Soto (segment "Mundo mágico")
Chronicles the life of a 17 year-old girl living in the upper-class Rio de Janeiro neighbourhood of Ipanema. Márcia lives a life of parties and spend her days among bohemians, musicians and intellectuals. While seeming happy in the outside, she's extremely anguished inside. Based on the famous song by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes.
Womanizer suddenly finds a woman who makes him change the way he looks at women. He falls in love, and believes she is in fact all women in one. Because of that, he has to face an important decision: to go on with his old life or embrace this special relationship and become a monogamous man.
