Oeste Outra Vez / Same Old West
For all its dry humour, Erico Rassi’s absurdist modern western is a consummate study in male companionship, loneliness, ego and hopelessness, set in the backlands of central-western Brazil.
Film review
Iracema – Uma Transa Amazónica
Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna’s once-banned film is an unusual proposition: half social drama, half documentary. The journey of an indigenous, teenage sex worker along the developing Trans-Amazónica Highway is a window into the extractive misery forced on Amazonian communities by the military regime.
Cidade Baixa / Lower City
Lower City’s toxic love triangle peers into the murky world of three young adults, muddling their way through life on the underside of Salvador, Bahia, who are wildly in love with each other; increasingly willing to betray each other; and completely unable to walk away from each other.
Retratos Fantasmas / Pictures of Ghosts
Made during the Covid-19 pandemic, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s unusual documentary traces Recife’s cinematic past and what remains. In digging into its history, the director would write his near future, developing the ideas and motifs that would coalesce into his political thriller The Secret Agent.
Propriedade
Daniel Bandeira’s unusual hostage thriller asks necessary and uncomfortable questions about class, labour and inequality in Brazil, exploring what he calls ‘the fear machine’ of heightening, mutual societal mistrust and polarisation.
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Following Brazil’s phenomenal representation at the Oscars this year, we revisit Héctor Babenco’s 1985 queer prison drama, a film with some surprising parallels with this year’s main contender.
Limite
Auteur Mário Peixoto’s sole cinematic work is a haunting silent film following three people who’d rather die at sea than continue on land. If you’re looking to trace the roots and reach of Brazilian cinema, Limite must be on your path.
Motel Destino
Karim Aïnouz’s neon-lit 2024 thriller is his most visually distinctive work yet, stirring up a tense, caged love story and an increasingly dangerous power struggle in the surreal environs of a seedy roadside motel.
Medida Provisoria / Executive Order
Lázaro Ramos’ 2020 dystopian speculative thriller unpacks the racist past and present with a nightmare scenario in which Brazil tries to excise its Black population with a mass deportation order.
Flores Raras / Reaching for the Moon
A latterday offering from the legendary LC Barreto stable, unfolding the bittersweet love story of Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares and American poet Elizabeth Bishop against the backdrop of the incoming Brazilian dictatorship.
Manas
A 13 year old girl in a remote village in the Amazon tries to escape a cycle of abuse. Developed from 10 years of research, documentary filmmaker Marianna Brennand’s first narrative feature explores unspoken truths and networks of complicity.
The Secret Agent: Where Memory Becomes a Mirror
Through the eyes of an academic on the run, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s acclaimed, quixotic opus honours the irreplaceable, ordinary lives and stories that a corrupt dictatorship and its enforcers snuff out – and the struggle to hold onto integrity, memory and life itself.