Dance of the Forty One 2020
Mexico City, November 1901. The police raid a private home where a secret party is being held. Among those attending is the son-in-law of President Porfirio Díaz.
Mexico City, November 1901. The police raid a private home where a secret party is being held. Among those attending is the son-in-law of President Porfirio Díaz.
The life of the owners of Circus Esperança, Puro Sangue e Pangaré, father and son, who plays two clowns. At a certain point, Pangaré starts showing tiredness and sadness for being an unhappy clown.
In a remote South American colony in the late 18th century, officer Zama of the Spanish crown waits in vain for a transfer to a more prestigious location. He suffers small humiliations and petty politicking as he increasingly succumbs to lust and paranoia.
By day, Mari and her friends broadcast their spiritual devotion through pastel pinks and catchy evangelical songs about purity and perfection, and by night they form a vigilante girl gang, prowling the streets in search of sinners who have deviated from the rightful path. After an attack goes wrong, leaving Mari scarred and unemployed, her views of community, religion, and her peers begin to shift.
The sierras of southern Brazil, 1963. The son of an French man and a Brazilian woman, Tony is a young man with a profound love of cinema and poetry. After graduating from college he returns to his small town in rural Brazil, to find out that his father had left for good, back to France. Tony then looks for the company of his fathers friends in search of information and references of a lost male role-model. He becomes a school teacher and a male figure to kids, in an attempt to provide them with something he lacks himself. A series of developments lead him to a surprising final lead on his fathers' whereabouts and reasons for leaving.
Kaí is a mysterious shaman who emerges from the Rio Paraná to help a poor farmer and his daughter, who are threatened by a band of cold-blooded mercenaries hired to force them to sell their land.
Barra da Tijuca, West Side Zone of Rio de Janeiro. A wave of murderers plague the area. What starts off as a morbid curiosity for the local youth, slowly begins to spoil away at their lives. Among them is Bia, a 15-year-old girl. After an encounter with death, she will do anything to make sure she is alive.
"The Dead Girl's Feast" narrates the story of Santinho, a young man who has been exalted to the position of a saint in a remote riverine community of the upper Amazonas state, after performing a “miracle” upon the suicide of his own mother. The film seeks to be an intimate picture of the ones who are involved in this sect and of the infinite human capacity of “fabricating” faith and seeking for some sense in the horrifying experience of death.
The aspiring actress Marivalda, her husband Wanderley, a bankrupt insurance broker and a false priest do their best to get along in life. But they end up in the hands of a drug boss, whose daughter they promised to save the life of, hit in a shooting at a party in São Cristóvão. A huge cash reward is at stake and now all three have to chase the promised miracle.
Kelly is an electronic forró singer in search of ascension. She does shows in the backlands of Brazil, but does not have many opportunities. For her career to become a success, she ends up killing some people along the way. Investigated for the murder of three men, she uses her itinerant presentations as an escape tool as she becomes known as Serial Kelly.
Caio is 40 years old and lives in the Rio de Janeiro's countryside, where he owns a scrap-metal yard. On Christmas' Eve, he goes to the capital to visit his family and friends. Finally he will be able to meet a man he has not seen for a long time: himself.
Lena is the only girl in the house, but that's not the only thing that makes her different from her four siblings. The boys like to go with their mother to the river, where she makes clay pots and pans and where washerwomen from nearby farms wash their clothes and dishes. They play in the woods and chase the farm animals. Lena doesn't like any of that. Lena likes to play indoors, always alone, with the windows closed, away from the sun. On the farm, they wait for Seu Deraldo, a farmer who lives in the city and who visits the property from time to time, to come. This time, the visit is more emotional than the others because Seu Deraldo won't be returning alone. Everyone there knows it. Everyone there feels it.
A small poor community called Javé is under threat of being flooded by a new dam that is being built, and the only way to prevent this is to prove the town's historical value. As most of the inhabitants are illiterate, they have no choice but to ask for the help of Antônio Biá, a man who has been ostracized ever since it was discovered that he had sent out letters with lies about their reputations as a way to keep his job in Javé's seldom-used post office. He now has the task of documenting people's memories of how the city was founded, yet each inhabitant has his or her own version of what happened.
ZAMA (2017, Lucrecia Martel) didn’t come alone. It brought with her a shooting journal written by Selva Almada –El mono en el remolino– and this documentary by Manuel Abramovich, who, as a sound intruder, captured the meticulous work of the director from Salta and the warm, human, joyful precision.
Luzimar cycles each day to and from work at the local cotton mill in his hometown of Cataguases, Minas Gerais, Brazil. He is a hard-working man, trying to make the most of what he has. One day, his childhood friend Gildo reappears, driving a fancy car and boasting of his successful life in São Bernardo do Campo, São Paulo. As the two sit down for a beer, memories, regrets and old resentments slowly resurface.
"All Paulos in the World" is a cinematographic essay about Paulo José, one of the greatest artists in Brazil, in the year in which he turns 80 years-old.
Tomas, an Afro-Colombian teenager who fled the country's Pacific coast pushed out by the war, faces the difficulties of growing up in a city if exclusion and racism. When Jairo, his younger brother and closest friend disappears, Tomas plunges in the streets of the city. His search becomes an initiatory journey that compels him to face his past and to leave aside the influence of his is brothers in order to find his own identity. Through this journey, Tomas reveals a unique perspective of a vibrant and unstable city that, like Tomas, stands on the threshold between what once was and what might be.
In the short end of pregnancy, a samba singer sees herself shared between two men that believes to be the father of her baby. Duelling men: a militiaman, a hacker and Shirley, a cross-dresser, best friend of the singer, who really plays the role of head on that family. Dreams, love, jealousy, life and death. Like in our songs.
On the border between the real and the fantastic, between the colonial past and the overwhelming modernity of agribusiness, the city of Goiás is the scene of the meeting between the young Fernanda and her secret roots. She returns to the home of her wealthy uncle, after the death of her adoptive mother, in order to implode the certainties and to reveal the painful truth about its origin.
"Fim do Sem Fim" is a feature-length documentary that has as its backdrop the imminent disappearance of certain trades and professions in Brazil. Shot in 10 Brazilian states, the film is a dive into the inventiveness and resistance of men in the face of technological and cultural changes.