Nelson Pereira dos Santos

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For six decades, the cinema of Nelson Pereira dos Santos has projected Brazil into the eyes of the world. Precursor of Cinema Novo, Nelson was, more than a director, he was an ideologue, a thinker of his country.

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Conducted from interviews with personalities who lived with Leila Diniz (1945-1972), the documentary is a record of an era and, above all, it rescues the participation in Brazilian culture of the actress who opened the way for the sexual revolution during the dark years of the dictatorship.

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An authentically marginal cinema created in Catholic university in Brazil. One of the most intriguing and imaginative moments in modern cinema in the voice of some of its select conspirators—with Carlos Reichenbach at the lead—, and through the most razing flow of images that can possibly be conceived.

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The city of Rio de Janeiro in the films of Nelson Pereira dos Santos contextualized by critic Rodrigo Fonseca.

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In 1965, a year after the military coup in Brazil, an oasis of freedom opened in the country's capital. The Brasília Film Festival: a landmark of cultural and political resistance. Its story is that of Brazilian cinema itself.

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Follows the story of Opinião, a theatre group created in 1964 during the early Brazilian dictatorship period to oppose the government through artistic performances. Considered the first left-wing response to the dictatorship, the group gathered now famous Brazilian artists such as Nara Leão, Maria Bethânia, João do Vale and Millôr Fernandes.

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Nelson Pereira dos Santos talks about The Highway of Life (1980)

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Two years of research and visits to collections, cinematheques and museums; almost seventy interviews that generated 30 hours of recorded material; more than two hundred scanned photos and more than one hundred films watched. In total, more than a thousand hours of work were needed to prepare Brazilian Cinema in the 20th Century. The work is a fascinating journey through all the cinematic cycles that Brazil lived, from the pioneering Belle Époque, through the great studios like Atlântica and Cinédia, Cinema Novo, the urban comedies of the 70's, until the resumption in the late 90's. The documentary is unique, it gives the floor to who really wrote and lived this story intensely.

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A deep investigation, in the way of a poetic essay, on one of the main Latin American movements in cinema, analyzed via the thoughts of its main authors, who invented, in the early 1960s, a new way of making movies in Brazil, with a political attitude, always near to people's problems, that combined art and revolution.

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A documentary on Cosme Alves Netto (1937-1996), former head of the Cinematheque of the Museum of Modern Arts at Rio de Janeiro.

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Documentary on the view, testimonies and times of Darcy Ribeiro, since military dictatorship.

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The film chronicles both the life and work of Brazilian author and engineer Euclides da Cunha and a failed attempt at directing his biopic in the 1980s and 1990s. Footage from the unfinished film is included alongside archive and documentary material.

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Seventy critics and filmmakers discuss cinema around the conflict between the artist and the observer, the creator and the critic. Between 1998 and 2007, Kléber Mendonça Filho recorded testimonies about this relationship in Brazil, the United States and Europe, based on his experience as a critic.

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This film shines a light at the story of Jards Macalé, polemic artist and controversial character of Brazilian culture over the last four decades. Author of songs such as "Vapor Barato" and "Movimento dos Barcos", a partner in crime of poet Waly Salomão, guitar player and songwriter for Gal Costa and Caetano Veloso, actor and author of soundtracks in Nelson Pereira dos Santos' films, a personal friend of visual artists Lygia Clarke and Hélio Oiticica, but, first and foremost, someone who dreams of seeing the word "love" in the Brazilian flag.

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The adventures of Pedro, a musician who is trying his luck in Rio de Janeiro, in the 1950's. He leaves his hometown Belo Horizonte to share a lodging with his brother Carlos in Rio. During one of his gigs, he meets Arlete, a singer in a vocal group and fall in love.

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A documentary made to coincide with Niemeyer's 100th birthday. The renowned architect talks about his long life, his inspirations, and his aspirations towards a just Brazil, and the ways he tried to help that along in his spectacular and beautiful buildings.

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16 members from the Brazilian Academy of Letters share their views on the current situation of the portuguese language.

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During a showing of rare Afro-Brazilian Cinema films at the Cinematheque of the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, actor/filmmaker Zózimo Bulbul gathered some of the most notorious Brazilian black directors to talk about their works, their lives and their perspectives on the future.

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Documentary about Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha, one of the most important names in the Cinema Novo, with interviews with some of his friends and colleagues.

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On 17 May 1931, the young director Mário Peixoto released his masterpiece "Limite" in a premiere in Capitólio Theater in Rio de Janeiro to astonished audiences bewildered by the impressive and poetic images. Considered by many viewers the best Brazilian movie ever made, this feature has never been released commercially. However, in a great paradox, Mário Peixoto has never made any other movie. The director Sérgio Machado pays a great tribute to the life and work Mário Peixoto a.k.a. Maçarico by his close friends with this documentary, using his diary; footages of "Limite", the never concluded "Onde a Terra Acaba" (1933) and the short "O Homem do Morcego" (1980); and interesting testimonies of Olga Breno, Ruy Solberg, Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Walter Salles among others.

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Memories of a parrot who participated in the filming of the classic Vidas Secas, in 1962, where it was featured along the puppy Baleia.

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1943, World War II. The northeastern coast of Brazil is an strategic region for the Allies. Giancarlo, an Italian immigrant married to a Brazilian woman, lives nearby the Parnamirin Field, the largest military base built by the USA outside of their territory. In this new base, Brazilian recruits who speak English suddenly find themselves reaching privileged positions.

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Documentary that addresses, through the testimony of directors and actors, the work of Dib Lutfi, considered one of the greatest photographers of Brazilian cinema.

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Documentary in four parts on Latin American cinema. First episode: the influences of Cahiers du cinéma, the New Wave, Italian neorealism. In Brazil, Cinema Novo draws inspiration from these models while drawing on the historical and cultural singularity of the country. The documentary was awarded the Prix Makhila d’or at the Festival de Biarritz, France.

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Documentary in four parts on Latin American cinema. Second episode, evoking the border between fiction and documentary. With his film Tire dié (1960), the Argentinian Fernando Birri proposed this manifesto: to create a realistic and critical national cinema, closer to society without falling into populism.

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The importance of the Cannes Film Festival in world terms and what it represented for Brazil in 1971. For Brazilian cinema, Cannes 71 represented the transition from film to industrialized production. It is the meeting of producers, technicians, critics , celebrities in general, offering opportunities for greater knowledge and renewal of values

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The work of Nelson Pereira dos Santos guides the documentary, which traces the path taken by Cinema Novo and addresses the issues raised by the filmmaker during the filming of Brazilian Cinema classics.

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Edson is having an affair with actress Maria do Rosário, who dreams of being a movie director. So he tries to get some easy money for her film, but is arrested and meets a police torturer instead.

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Half a century ago, Brazilian composer and musician Antonio Carlos "Tom" Jobim (1927-1994) introduced bossa nova to a worldwide audience with "The Girl from Ipanema." This relaxed, cool, sensuous music blended jazz and samba. After recording an album of songs by his friend Jobim, Frank Sinatra is reported to have said, "I haven't sung so quietly since I had laryngitis." Naturally, "The Girl from Ipanema" and Frank Sinatra are featured in this musical collage of countless seamlessly edited excerpts of concert footage that cover decades of events all over the world: from Rio de Janeiro to Lisbon, Paris, Copenhagen, Jerusalem, Tokyo, Montreal, New York and back to Rio.

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A star medical examiner is called to Brasília, the administrative capital of Brazil, to confirm the identity of a beautiful, young congressional aide's dead body. But his scientific rigor soon leads him to details of a multi-layered political scandal.

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An aging Brazilian actor teams up with a film student on a trip to Mexico, in order to find out an unknown movie his mother allegedly watched before she committed suicide.

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After an extended period directing original screenplays, dos Santos returned to the creative engagement with literature that was the wellspring of his early masterpieces, offering a combinatory adaptation of five stories by the renowned Brazilian novelist João Guimarães Rosa. Openly embracing a mode of magical realism, dos Santos' celebrated film tells the story of a farming family defined by the absence of its father who abruptly abandoned his wife and children, sailing away down the river, including his son who continues to communicate with his father, speaking daily to him from the river bank. While offering an evocative vision of rural Brazil as a timeless land of mystery and solemnity, The Third Bank of the River is also bitingly satiric in the remarkable depiction of religious belief when the family moves to the city and its youngest member, a mesmerizing little girl, is revealed to be a kind of saint, capable of miraculous acts. -Harvard Film Archive

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Milionário and José Rico are robbed of their money and their fans' enthusiasm. But a female truck driver is out to help them.

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Jubiabá is a French-Brazilian film based on the homonymous novel by Jorge Amado. The film tells the story of the interracial love between the daughter of a rich Commander and Antonio Balduíno, a rascal, fighter and famous lover from Salvador.

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In the 1930s, novelist and politician Graciliano Ramos is accused of being a communist sympathizer. He is then arrested and sent to the Ilha Grande prison, where he experiences the disturbing treatment reserved for common prisoners.

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A three-episode anthology film based on short stories by Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos.

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It's Christmas Eve and an aunt and her nephew have to deal with their platonic relationship.

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A young man learns to how to be a thief from a more experienced one.

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When a prominent U.S. Nobel Laureate arrives in Salvador, Bahia, the city with the largest black population in Brazil, he stirs emotions by championing a long-forgotten local writer named Pedro Archanjo, who believed that humanity would be improved only through miscegenation.

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A newlywed woman, frustrated after her honeymoon, decides to search for lovers on the streets and ends up causing a conflict between her husband, a baker and a black artist.

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An ubiquitous folk singer narrates the tale of a young boy, who apparently becomes immune to gunfire after his mother arranges for him to have an amulet bearing Ogum's blessings. As time goes by, he becomes a valuable member of a mobster's hit-team, but ends up joining a group of people who resist his original employers.

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The critical success in France of How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman made possible dos Santos’ delirious science-fiction vision of free love in a post-apocalyptic wilderness besieged by flesh hungry zombies contaminated by an unnamed nuclear attack. Who is Beta? follows two statuesque survivors drawn irresistibly together only to be entranced by the arrival and sudden disappearance of a third, the bewitching raven haired Beta. With its cartoon-like depiction of extreme violence and desire, Who is Beta? offers a heady Pop-infused companion to Hunger for Love. Yet beneath its giddy play of surfaces, dos Santos' underappreciated film gradually reveals a darkly ambiguous metaphoric dimension. -Harvard Film Archive

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In 1594 Brazil, a frenchman becomes a prisoner of the Tupinambás. While waiting to be executed, the foreigner learns the habits of the indigenous people and joins a woman who tries to help him escape.

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Father Simão Bacamarte arrives in the small town of Serafim to investigate a certain phenomenon of madness.

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An extended research tour of US university film programs introduced dos Santos to the American avant-garde filmmakers, among them Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage, who would directly inspire his formally radical adaptation of an allegorical short story about adultery and colonialism by Guilherme de Figueiredo. Filmed in both Manhattan and Brazil and set against the background of the Vietnam War and its protests, Hunger for Love uses a rigorously abstract soundtrack and narrative structure to evoke the acute paranoia of the period building up to the December 1968 military coup that tipped Brazil perilously close to a conservative dictatorship. With its harsh critique of the decadent tendencies of the Sixties counterculture, Hunger for Love offers a key expression of the self-consciously “ideological” phase of Cinema Novo. -Harvard Film Archive

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A shockingly irreverent follow-up to the rural austerity of Barren Lives, dos Santos’ Godardian social satire owes more than a nod to the self-conscious antics of the French New Wave. The pampered son of a general, El Justicero is a hipster playboy who fancies himself a James Bond/Jean Paul Sartre urban hero. “Archetypical” yet “full of contradictions,” he sees that justice is achieved for the disadvantaged while taking advantage of certain bourgeois perks. His exploits are closely followed and eventually directed by his biographer who decides a film is not only more lucrative than a book, but it gives him the luxury of reviewing previous scenes. Unlike Bond, El Jus eventually experiences an awakening which threatens to compromise the entertainment value and glamour of his life story. - Harvard Film Archive

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Documentary about middle-class people in Rio de Janeiro, in the 1960s, when Brazil was going through a hard period in its history, with the military coup and the following dictatorship. Interviews with people in the street disclose their fears, aspirations and political alienation.

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Documentary about the history of Jornal do Brasil, founded on April 14, 1891. In 1965, the Jornal do Brasil marked its innovative and active position, as recorded in the documentary "A Seventv-Four- Year-Old Fellow" by the filmmaker Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and the story itself was in charge of confirming. In the following years, the newspaper would witness the most remarkable events of the second half of the twentieth century in Brazil and in the world. It would applaud the democratic struggles and independence of peoples, support social demonstrations against oppression and justice at all levels. Tirelessly, he did not hesitate to report the truth of the facts, regardless of the circumstances in which they presented themselves.

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A destitute family tries to escape the drought in the backlands of northeastern Brazil. Fabiano (Átila Iório), Sinhá Vitória (Maria Ribeiro), their two children and their dog Baleia wander aimlessly and almost hopelessly through the remote interior, surviving the forces of nature and the cruelty of men. An adaptation of the work by Graciliano Ramos.

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After a powerful outlaw dies, a reporter interviews his lover and gets three different stories about the legendary man.

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Despite being promised to another man, a young orphaned woman falls in love with man working at the farm she lives in , and together they escape. According tradition in Northeast Brazil, her aunt goes after them, in order to kill them for revenge.

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On the day of his wedding, young man from a family of immigrants faces some problems to get the money needed for the last arrangements. The family do what they can in order to honour the great event, selling personal belongings and buying enough supplies for a decent party.

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A talented songwriter of sambas is forced to face the social injustices of the city around him.

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On a scorching summer day in Rio de Janeiro, five impoverished black boys venture out of their favela to peddle peanuts throughout the bustling city. As they navigate the various districts of Rio, they bear witness to a series of unfortunate events and encounters, unfolding a vivid tapestry of urban life in Rio de Janeiro during that period. These true misadventures shed light on the gritty reality of the city, unveiling its vibrant urban tapestry.

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