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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the earliest feature films from Walter Salles (I’m Still Here), this is a dreamy, parched meditation on the wasteful futility of revenge.
No country does a road movie like Brazil – especially when the open road is the Amazon river.
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.
