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.
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.
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.
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.
Glauber Rocha’s thundering polemic on the corruption inherent in politics; banned in the early years of Brazil’s dictatorship, it stands as one of his most compelling works.
