Brazil

  • Nelson Pereira dos Santos – Boca de Ouro AKA The Golden Mouth [+Extras] (1963)

    1961-1970BrazilDramaNelson Pereira dos Santos

    When powerful outlaw “Boca de Ouro” dies, a reporter interviews his former lover Guigui, to try to outline his personality. But the woman offers him three different versions of the facts, following the changes of her own personal feelings towards the man.

    Quote:
    Nelson Rodrigues’ Rashomon-lite gangster melodrama gets a purposive physical rendering on the hands of Nelson Pereira dos Santos. The filmmaker always described this as gun for hire work, but it is one of his most dramatic exact films and the cast is terrific. (Filipe Furtado)Read More »

  • Tavinho Teixeira – Sol Alegria (2018)

    2011-2020ArthouseBrazilComedyQueer Cinema(s)Tavinho Teixeira

    An eccentric family with a mission travels through dictatorial Brazil to save humanity from destruction.Read More »

  • Alberto Cavalcanti – O Canto do Mar (1952)

    1951-1960Alberto CavalcantiBrazilClassicsDrama

    IMDB:
    In the drought areas of Northeastern of Brazil, groups of migrants move trying to find better place to live, at least with water. Some of them go to Recife, to get a vessel to Santos expecting to have a better life in the Southern. In the poor area of Recife, an old washerwoman launders clothes to survive and support her family. Her husband Zé Luis, a former sailor, is crazy due to a hit of the boom of a mast on his head. Her older son Raimundo works in a grocery and selling mangoes on the street, trying to save money to move to the Southeastern with his girl-friend Aurora. Her daughter wants to be a prostitute to have a better quality of life. Her younger son is seriously sick.Read More »

  • Júlio Bressane – Sedução da Carne (2018)

    2011-2020BrazilDramaExperimentalJúlio Bressane

    A delicate and tenacious writer, widowed three years ago, engages in frequent conversations with a parrot. However, she’s always observed by a large portion of raw meat.Read More »

  • Nelson Pereira dos Santos – O Amuleto de Ogum aka The Amulet of Ogum [+Extras] (1974)

    1971-1980BrazilDramaNelson Pereira dos Santos

    Ogum is one of the deities of Brazil’s many voodoo-related folk religions. This story is narrated by an ubiquitous folk singer and tells of a young boy whose mother arranges for him to have an amulet bearing Ogum’s blessings which would make him immune to gunfire. The amulet apparently works, for the boy becomes a member of a mobster’s hit-team and then joins with a group of people who resist his original employers.Read More »

  • Glauber Rocha – Barravento AKA The Turning Wind (1962)

    1961-1970ArthouseBrazilDramaGlauber Rocha

    Rocha’s first film, a denunciation of exploitation and the superstition that helps maintain it; an exploration of ‘macumba’, the mixture of Christianity and African tribal religion whose superstition aids the successful subjugation and exploitation of the fishermen in the Bahia province.

    Review from NY Times:
    LEAD: ”BARRAVENTO” (”The Turning Wind”), opening today at the Public Theater, is the first feature by the highly regarded Brazilian director Glauber Rocha, who died at the age of 42 in 1981. The film, made in 1961, is about the efforts of Firmino, part revolutionary, part devil, to free the fishermen in his nativeRead More »

  • Glauber Rocha – A Idade da Terra AKA The Age of the Earth (1980)

    1971-1980ArthouseBrazilExperimentalGlauber Rocha

    Four Third-World Christs try to stop the American industrialist John Brahms in Glauber Rocha’s experimental film inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s murder.

    The day that Pier Paolo Pasolini was killed, Glauber Rocha decided to make this film about the life of Christ in the Third World. Starting from a dialectical synthesis between capitalism and socialism, and a search of interracial relationships in Brazil, Rocha created a work of religious and prophetic tone that results in a kind of bewilderment contemplative, now lyrical, now frantic, soaked in a new messianism. In his last film, the director proposed a tune of sounds and images that build a picture of Brazil and a portrait of himself.Read More »

  • Hugo Prata – Elis (2016)

    2011-2020BrazilDramaHugo PrataMusical

    The life of Elis Regina, undoubtedly the greatest Brazilian singer of all time, is told in this biopic film with energetic and pulsating rhythm.Read More »

  • Glauber Rocha – O Dragão da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro AKA Antonio das Mortes (1969)

    1961-1970ArthouseBrazilGlauber RochaWestern

    Period piece about a Brazil that is no more. This movie is the sequel to “God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun” (Deus e o diabo na terra do sol), and takes place 29 years after Antonio das Mortes killed Corisco (the “Blond Devil”), last of the Cangaceiros. In “the old days”, Antonio’s function in life was exterminate these bandits, on account of his personal grudges against them. His life had been meaningless for the last 29 years, but now, a new challenge awaits him. When a Cangaceiro appears in Jardim Das Piranhas, the local Land Baron (Jofre Soares), an old man, does what seems obvious to him: he calls Antonio das Mortes, killer of Cangaceiros. At first, Antonio is ecstatic. His life has gained new meaning. But soon it becomes obvious that this new Cangaceiro (named Coirana) is no Corisco, but an idealist. An idealist of the sixties in the garb of the forties. A leader to the hopeless and the hungry. Antonio das Mortes begins to reconsider his feelings towards Coirana and his followers…Read More »

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