Leila Diniz
"Portraits and excerpts from Brazilian films from all times. Actors, directors and images that affirm cinema."
Documentary on famous Brazilian actresses, female directors and the role of women in Brazilian film history.
A documentary that presents home movies and several excerpts of known films of famous actress Leila Diniz. Friends of the late actress, tragic killed on a plane crash in 1972, discuss about her life, her work and her legacy in Brazilian culture.
On Carnival's eve, girl dreams of a man to stay with her during these four days. She meets a photographer, with whom she has an affair.
In a small town in the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil, a woman rebels against local morality after her child dies, with tragic results.
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
Two ladykillers living in Rio de Janeiro know no limits when courting a beautiful woman. A problem arises when one of them starts coming on to a girl, not knowing she's his buddy's daughter.
Delfino, a quiet man who lives in Congonhas do Campo, a small historical town in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, is urged by his friend to steal the image of the Madona de Cedro (the Cedar Madonna), sculpted by Aleijadinho in the 18th century, from the town sanctuary.
A volatile young man, Edu is a typical Rio de Janeiro middle-class kind, who flirts with multiple women at the same time. None of them, however, had managed to make him fall in love, until he met with mysterious Tatiana.
An extended research tour of US university film programs introduced dos Santos to the American avant-garde filmmakers, among them Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage, who would directly inspire his formally radical adaptation of an allegorical short story about adultery and colonialism by Guilherme de Figueiredo. Filmed in both Manhattan and Brazil and set against the background of the Vietnam War and its protests, Hunger for Love uses a rigorously abstract soundtrack and narrative structure to evoke the acute paranoia of the period building up to the December 1968 military coup that tipped Brazil perilously close to a conservative dictatorship. With its harsh critique of the decadent tendencies of the Sixties counterculture, Hunger for Love offers a key expression of the self-consciously “ideological” phase of Cinema Novo. -Harvard Film Archive
German documentary for TV about the "Cinema Novo" movement (Brazilian New Wave). Director Joaquim Pedro de Andrade focuses on six Cinema Novo filmmakers working in Rio in 1967.
Based on real-life Brazilian bandit "Mineirinho", the film follows the story of Zezé, a man falsely accused by sensasionalist press of being a high-caliber criminal who suddenly becomes one of the most wanted men of Rio de Janeiro.
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.
