Brazil

A man lives in conflict as he deals with his friends and love interests against the backdrop of São Paulo.Read More »

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(…) Ferreira finest and most political film is Horror Palace Hotel. This forty-minute piece does many things at once: it is an essay about the state of Brazilian cinema, which unfortunately has not yet dated enough; a spot-on look at how film functions within a film festival; a haunted house movie; and a contagious narrative. It was shot during the 1978 Brasilia Film Festival, where a small horror sidebar is going on, in the hotel where everyone that works around the festival (filmmakers, journalists) is staying. This most angry of Ferreira’s films, it is his most focused on achieving, through close observation and a perfect structure, both physical precision and an ambitious allegorical tendency. Using Rogério Sganzerla as a guide and José Mojica Marins as a main object, Horror Palace Hotel slowly arrives at its central targets by transgressing all borders. The horror sidebar becomes something much larger, thanks to Ferreira’s camera: it becomes whole repressed history of Brazilian cinema. Horror, we learn, is not just a genre there anymore, but everything that does not fit into official history; the film thus restages an invasion of the official event by those who represent the repressed. A new history of cinematic forms takes over.Read More »

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Born and raised in the misery of Brazilian slums, Jorge becomes a luxury house burglar in São Paulo and gets nicknamed “The Red Light Bandit” by the sensationalist press. In addition to wearing a red flashlight, he talks to his hostages in an irreverent tone and makes bold breakthroughs to later spend the money extravagantly. His world is the decadent neighbourhood of Boca do Lixo.Read More »

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Rio de Janeiro police investigator Galvão is pursuing two trails, one professional and one personal. While he tracts a serial killer of taxi-drivers, he also seeks his estranged daughter, Sandra, who he had thrown out of the family home when she adopted a promiscuous teenage lifestyle. Lives intersect when the serial killer, Toninho, a young man of unsavoury connections, befriends Sandra, now an exotic dancer and prostitute living and working in the seamy underside of late 1970s Rio. Theirs is an unstable relationship, built on unmet emotional need, lived in the shadow of her father’s pursuit.Read More »

Playboy from São Paulo decides to marry, but all his ex-girlfriends go to the ceremony to protest.Read More »

Eva, a sexology teacher, stays at Robertinho’s farm to cure him of his sexual shyness. Successfully, she seduces him and his sister Naná, despite the uncompromising morality of their parents, who are from a traditional family in Minas Gerais. The father, after some resistance, reveals that his moralism comes from a childhood trauma when he caught his parents in a sexual relationship. Eva believes the father can benefit from her expertise and will try to cure him.Read More »

Wrongly convicted for the death of a guard during a robbery, Tininha arrives at the women’s prison and is soon the target of a dispute between Rafaela, the cruel and corrupt director, and Nadir, the leader of the inmates, who organizes a mass escape plan.Read More »

In the words of the director, a movie about ‘the colonizers in the view of the colonized’, the movie presents a series of disconnected happenings throughout Europe and Brazil emphasizing the perception of human life as trance-like experiences and thus offering a view of the human history as a connection of symbolic behavior.Read More »

Plot: Based upon the true story of Olga Benário, the German-born wife of Brazilian communist leader Luís Carlos Prestes. During the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas (1930-1945) she was arrested and…Read More »