Helena Ignez

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In Esdras Baptista's film archives, kept at his home for decades, one can feel the fervor of those who believed in a new tomorrow. Filmed in Brazil in the early 1960s, in the heat of a libertarian political movement, the filmmaker's images materialize the incandescence of collective desires at the historic moment of their emergence. Utopia, though unattainable, is never a mere abstraction. A force that mobilizes actions and feelings, it constitutes the impetus necessary for human existence.

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Cleo, a 43-year-old astronomer who is pregnant and emotionally fragile, is surprised by a visit from Nalu, her half-sister of Indigenous descent. The encounter reveals dark secrets and stirs up fragmented memories in Cleo, leading the two of them down a path of mysterious investigations.

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The series follows Secos & Molhados, the rock band that shaped music and concepts in Brazil. In exactly twelve months, the group broke all records — selling over 1 million records of their debut album and playing to 25,000 people at Maracanãzinho Stadium. With painted faces and sinuous dance moves, they brought gender issues, androgyny, and the poetry of authors like Manuel Bandeira and Vinicius de Moraes into the country's homes.

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Nosferatu arrives in a town escaping from Van Helsing. He brings not only his curse, but ghosts from his past. In this escape, he dives into a macabre dance searching for an actress and faces the horror of eternity and the pain of an endless existence.

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In an ancient family mansion, mother Sydia and daughter Nina spend a tense night of isolation just as a solar storm threatens to collapse the Earth’s gravity. What begins as a fraught domestic moment quickly shifts when a mysterious visitor, Lara, arrives, and the house’s long‑missing employee, Joana, returns with disturbing news from the outside world. As the cosmic and terrestrial crises gather, the four women are forced to face buried secrets, generational trauma and shifting power dynamics. Their physical refuge becomes a battleground of psychological and symbolic upheaval, where the end of the world becomes mirror to the end of the old order — and perhaps the beginning of something new.

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An old man is tired of celebrating his birthday.

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Close to turning forty and away from his job as a librarian due to depression, Marcos needs to take care of Baby, his sister's pet dog. Isolated in an apartment in the city center, Marcos relies on the support of analyst Dr. Juliana R., who sees him in therapy sessions. Together, they look for ways to deal with the grief over the death of his ex-boyfriend, Pedro, and the arrival of a new love, Gabriel. Baby, a special hairless dog of Aztec origin, will redefine his relationship with the world of the dead and the living as well.

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In an old, dilapidated mansion in downtown São Paulo, an old Shakespearean actor exiled from the stage lives with his ghosts. In his bed, surrounded by red curtains taken from an abandoned theater, he dreams of the plague and fire spreading throughout the country. A strange community forms around the old actor.

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70 years ago, a visionary management in education and culture as a political strategy for the dissemination and development of Bahia gave rise to an artistic vanguard that still impacts Brazilian culture today.

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New Rio, 2054 AD. The Order of Truth wreaks havoc on the streets, killing every being that has special powers. Renowned witch Dahlia is determined to beat the Order and assembles a clan of trans and queer people, each with their own supernatural talent. The fate of the city is in their hands.

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In 2018, Brazil’s 1988 Constitution turned thirty. Known as the Citizen Constitution, it was a landmark in the history of Brazil, the outcome of across-the-board engagement of society in its preparation. In Congress, the parliamentarians best known for their involvement in this initiative were names that are still familiar today in Brazil’s political history: Ulysses Guimarães, Teotônio Vilela, Tancredo Neves and Nelson Carneiro.

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Hated by the Greeks, detested by the Trojans, Helena lives a peaceful life in Guaratiba, a fishing neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro. Until love knocks on her door, bringing back ghosts from her past.

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For this behemoth, Bressane took his opera omnia and edited it in an order that first adheres to historical chronology but soon starts to move backwards and forward. The various pasts – the 60s, the 80s, the 2000s – comment on each other in a way that sheds light on Bressane’s themes and obsessions, which become increasingly apparent and finally, a whole idea of cinema reveals itself to the curious and patient viewer. Will Bressane, from now on, rework The Long Voyage of the Yellow Bus when he makes another film? Is this his latest beginning? Why not, for the eternally young master maverick seems to embark on a maiden voyage with each and every new film!

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A film about love, also a memoir, about the trip made in the 1970s to Morocco by Jarda Ícone, an artist, sexologist, and octogenarian rocker, as she defines herself, and Lírio Terron, a human rights activist. In fact, a journey that is not over in their lives. Jarda Icon teaches classes on how women can obtain their own orgasm. With her group of disciples and friends Ana Brasil, Sheyla Fernanda, Caroline Sylvie and Lakshmi she develops self-sustainable feminist and artistic projects. The film is political, but not at all politicized in the traditional sense. It is an ode to the underground and counterculture movements, it is a hymn to freedom, and its title is also a tribute to Oswald d Andrade, one of the main names in Brazilian modernism.

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A street vendor who lives in the outskirts of São Paulo returns home at night and does not find her teenager son. After a nonstop search, she finds out the boy was killed by the police and his body is missing. This is the beginning of this woman’s vertiginous fight for the right to bury her son, a fight that will not only unveil the excessive violence of one of most lethal police forces of the world, but also how structural is racism in Brazilian society.

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The raft man Manuel Jacaré was swallowed by the sea when Orson Welles was filming It's All True in 1942. The fact evokes memories of the dictatorship of the Estado Novo, of World War II, of Ceará fishermen's struggle for labor rights and housing in their traditional space - target of real estate speculation.

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A self-portrait short film by veteran Brazilian filmmaker Sylvio Lanna.

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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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An experimental trip about Brazil after H.O.

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Benjamim Zambraia is a young drunk who wanders around the city and is sometimes treated with pampering and sometimes with a beating by his parents (Helena Ignez and Otávio Terceiro). As in Chico's book, the boy is obsessed with a big stone.

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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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After relocating to Tokyo, a Brazilian writer begins a new novel, provoked by her experiences in Japan and by one of the last scenes she witnessed in Rio de Janeiro: a female swimmer tearing up the horizon with powerful strokes in the wide, open sea. Those two women apparently share no connection, until their lives start to interfere in one another, strangely linked through the sea. Hannah, the writer, plunges into a journey of self-discovery in Japan, while Ana, the swimmer in Rio de Janeiro, oddly has her body transformed into some kind of inner Ocean.

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In 1979, while Brazil was going through the troubled moment of the Amnesty Law, Glauber Rocha directed the program Abertura for TV Tupi, in which he interrogated a contradictory and boiling Brazil head-on, full of utopias but always under the weight of secular wounds.

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After being born Georgina in the outback of Bahia, she became known as Diva Rios in São Paulo’s Boca do Lixo and Rio de Janeiro’s Lapa, as well as Suzy King in the nights of Copacabana, but died as Jacuí Japurá on the border of the United States and Mexico. Four names for just one woman: fascinating, moody and very creative. Singer, songwriter, actress, ballet, folk, burlesque and exotic dancer, snake charmer and fakir were only some of the artistic endeavors she tackled during her life. Found dead on the trailer where she lived in August of 1985, in California, she left behind stories without conclusion, lost remainings of her troubled trajectory and a trail of mystery. Three decades later, two historians gather fragments of her tale with the goal of piecing together the complex puzzle that was her life. Actresses, singers, musicians and performers join them to rescue the poetic aspects of her unique personality. A question resounds throughout the entire movie: Suzy King, who are you?

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A person locked in the room.

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Short film by Helena Ignez, for the "Programa Convida", from IMS, dedicated to creation during quarantine.

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The narrative takes place in 1888 and tells the story of Lenita, a young woman, raised by her father, with an educated background, who disregards the existence of a man at his intellectual height. The film exposes the character's internal conflicts and the conventions of the time.

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A film about love, also a memoir, about the trip made in the 1970s to Morocco by Jarda Ícone, an artist, sexologist, and octogenarian rocker, as she defines herself, and Lírio Terron, a human rights activist. In fact, a journey that is not over in their lives. Jarda Icon teaches classes on how women can obtain their own orgasm. With her group of disciples and friends Ana Brasil, Sheyla Fernanda, Caroline Sylvie and Lakshmi she develops self-sustainable feminist and artistic projects. The film is political, but not at all politicized in the traditional sense. It is an ode to the underground and counterculture movements, it is a hymn to freedom, and its title is also a tribute to Oswald d Andrade, one of the main names in Brazilian modernism.

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The feature-length documentary Fakir portrays the success of fakirism in Brazil, Latin America and France. This circus art origin show is presented and analyzed through archives that reveals the success of these presentations with their pain resistance championships and the great public presence, including politicians and government officials. Fakir spans current footage from contemporary artists who keep this art alive in performances and shows.

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A film in which dream and reality intertwine, A Moça do Calendário tells the story of inácio, 40, married, without a permanent job. Ex-street sweeper, he works as a mechanic at Barato da Pesada, where he dreams of the calendar girl.

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Young directors are filming “The Exhibitionist” in the middle of a farm in a paradise-like region. The film poetically investigates the Brazilian soul, with the Amazon as the center of the world, reflecting on existential issues, the right to sexual freedom and individuality.

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Ugly, Me? is a film manifesto made from a workshop for actors called Characters in Search of a Movie, in 'La pa', 'Rio De Janeiro', extended to Paris and 'Kerala' (India). Multifaceted like a kaleidoscope, the characters appear in multi-screens scenes and sequences. The images were captured with different kinds of cameras and Ugly, Me? uses this sign of the variety imposed by independent production as language experimentation. Transposing the boundaries of style, Ugly, Me? navigates in a sea of metaphors, philosophical and musical politics, from Prince Harry to Heraclitus, going through a series of authors like Rimbaud, Brecht, Nietzsche, Bispo do Rosario and Eduardo Viveiros DE Castro, capturing a contradictory and original country.

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A study that unwraps a paradisiac scenery, reaching the subjects of Brazility and its force in the change of habits, breaking taboos and bringing out a magical and original reality throught its characters.

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Jorge, bastard child of the infamous Red Light Bandit, decides himself to pursuit a life of crime after meeting with his father, who has been incarcerated for the last 30 years.

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A marginal version of Brecht’s piece, “Baal”.

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