Abraccine's The 100 Best Brazilian Films

At the riverside of rio Tietê, in São Paulo, prostitutes, a pimp, a mentally disabled man, a handicap, people in the margin of the society live their ordinary hopeless lives without any expectation and waiting to die and join themselves in the boat of hell.

The history of an unsatisfied man trying to please and understand the mind of a hooker that he falls in love madly.

In the favelas of Rio de Janeiro of the 1930s, João Francisco dos Santos is several things — son of slaves, ex-convict, thug, homosexual and adopted father for a number of pariahs. João expresses himself on the stage of a cabaret as Madame Satã.

After visiting a fortune teller, Zulmira is informed that a blonde woman will threaten her peace. After talking to her husband Toninho, she suspects that her cousin Glorinha may be that blonde.

Psychiatrist experiments LSD on 4 volunteers, to investigate Coffin Joe's influence over them. Each patient presents a different reaction, involving sex, perversion and sadism.

Middle-class family reform their apartment, and the noise, the contact with the workers and strange occurrences turn what was supposed to be a trivial matter into a trip to hell.

A personal vision of contemporary Brazil and its evolution, with a number of archetypes which recall some of Glauber Rocha's previous films : the Indian, the Colonizer, the Nordeste man, the Worker, the Amazon, the Bourgeois and a black Christ bringing new revolutionary hope for the Third World.

Brazilian badlands, April 1910. Tonho is ordered by his father to avenge the death of his older brother. The young man knows that if he commits this crime, his life will be divided in two: the twenty years he has already lived and the few days he has left to live, before the other family avenges their son's death. He is torn between fulfilling h...

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.

A child is kidnapped. At the police station, Sylvia and Bernardo, the victim’s parents, and Rosa, the main suspect and Bernardo’s lover, give contradictory evidence which will take audiences to the gloomiest corners of desires, lies, needs and wickedness in the relationship of these three characters.

The story of two radically different men thrown together in a Latin American prison cell. One is Valentin, a journalist being tortured for his political beliefs. The other is Molina, a gay window-dresser who fills their lonely nights by spinning romantic fantasies drawn from memories of old movies.

Deraldo, a popular poet from Northeast Brazil, arrives in the capital of São Paulo, making a living only from his poetry and pamphlets. All is well until he is mistaken for a multinational worker who killed the boss at a party where he received the title of symbolic worker.

The (mis)adventures of João Grilo and Chicó in Brazil's Northeastern region. The four-chapter miniseries original version of O Auto da Compadecida.

'Capitão', a bandit, terrorizes poor villages in the Northeast region of Brazil, looting and frequently killing with his armed gang, until he kidnaps and becomes attracted to a beautiful schoolteacher, creating discord in his group.

During the Carnival, in Niterói, the son of a Lira do Delírio nightclub dancer is kidnapped. With the help of a journalist friend, she dives into Rio de Janeiro's underworld and meet all kind of criminals. She also goes back in time, to a past carnival, where she thinks she might pin-point the culprit among a group of people.

After their relative and associate runs way, the Naves brothers inform the police of the incident, who end up arresting them under the accusation of murdering the missing person. The brothers are tortured in order to confess a crime they did not commit while their wives are raped.

Documentary depicts what happened in Rio de Janeiro on June 12th 2000, when bus 174 was taken by an armed young man, threatening to shoot all the passengers. Transmitted live on all Brazilian TV networks, this shocking and tragic-ending event became one of violence's most shocking portraits, and one of the scariest examples of police incompetenc...

Santamaria and Urtigo are two bandits on the run, one is white, the other black. Santamaria is a mystical visionary and believes in the imminent coming of a purifying angel. Urtiga, his inseparable companion, is a simple-minded and ingenious man who follows Santamaria around and participates in the crimes he commits. The two bandits take over a ...

As a child he was kidnapped by gypsies that raised him, without he ever knowing his parents. As a young man Tonho leaves the gypsies and go live by himself, meeting in his way a beautiful woman, who lost her brother, and a dangerous gang of violent criminals.

In order to get funds, a young woman living in the Northeast of Brazil decides to raffle her own body.

After leaving her daughter Jessica in a small town in Pernambuco to be raised by relatives, Val spends the next 13 years working as a nanny to Fabinho in São Paulo. She has financial stability but has to live with the guilt of having not raised Jessica herself. As Fabinho’s university entrance exams approach, Jessica reappears in her life and se...

Neto is a middle class teenager living a normal life. After his father finds a marijuana cigarette on his pocket, he is sent to a mental institution, where he gets to know a completely absurd and inhumane reality in which people are devoured by a corrupt and cruel system.

Paulete, the star of a daring theater group, is visited by his military brother-in-law, the young Fininha. A torrid relationship arises between the two, and now the soldier must deal with the prevailing repression during the Brazilian military dictatorship.

In the great restaurant of life, there are those who eat and those who get eaten. Raimundo Nonato finds an alternative way, a life of his own: he cooks in order to survive and find a place in society.

1942, in the middle of Northeastern Brazil, two very different men meet along the road: Johan, an aspirin salesman avoiding the German draft, and Ranulpho, a rural Brazilian seeking escape from the drought.

A Lebanese photographer living in Brazil in the '30s manages to film the band of Lampião, a legendary Brazilian bandit.

Mid-1970s. When the military regime's "economic miracle" and the victory of the Brazilian football team on the World Cup serve as a distraction for the persecution of opposition leaders by the political police of the dictatorship. Under this context, Jofre Godoi da Fonseca, an alienated middle-class man, is mistaken for Sarmento, a political act...

The story of a famous Brazilian bandit in the early 1970s and his fight against a paramilitary organization known as the Death Squad.

Fortune takes four human beings to the last frontier of passion. There, where love becomes almost inhuman and divine. As if he was a comet, Rafael, the traveler, appears at the party for the cities patron saint, in a small town in the interior of Minas Gerais. He is the one who brings passion and crime, vanishing afterwards, leaving a poetic fee...

The lives of three teachers in the outskirts of São Paulo, their love lives, their interaction with the poor surroundings, their family problems.

A woman runs away in the company of her daughter, the ultimate brat, in a journey full of bizarre events.

Documentary about a region in Northeast Brazil, situated in an area subject to severe drought, and the evolution of its economic activities.

Nhô Quim has only one dream in his life: to eat red meat. He meets Carula, a young woman anxious to get married, who promises him that in their wedding her father will kill him an ox. But, before that, Nhô Quim must pass a series of tests.

In the 40s, a sergeant is ordered to escort a political prisoner from Paulo Afonso to Aracaju, Brazil. During the trip, there's a change in the Government and he is ordered to release the prisoner. But he decides to go all the way.

In the 19th century, a country girl is seduced by a young doctor who's staying at her house for a few days, caring for her, and tries to hide the forbidden romance from her father, who disapproves of the relationship.

The Brazilian coastal town of Recife, with its means streets and colorful characters, is the backdrop to the stories of how the lower half lives.

Humble officials, friends Didi, Dedé, Mussum and Zacarias become the great attraction of the circus Bartolo, thanks to its incredible ability to make the public laugh. But success has a price: the opposition of the magician Assis Satan and the greed of the Baron, the owner of the circus. Together, the four friends will have to fight them.

This controversial film from director Glauber Rocha records the funeral of his friend, major Brazilian painter Emiliano Di Cavalcanti.

The real story of the failed attempt of an independence coup by a group of intellectuals and rich men during Brazil's colonial days, from its beginning to the execution of Tiradentes.

Coffin Joe, the unholy undertaker, is back in town to continue his quest for the perfect woman, embarking on an even more brutal campaign of terror, aided and abetted by his hunchbacked assistant.

An adventurer travels by train through the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, meeting old and new lovers and remembering love affairs of his youth.

70-year-old widower living in a poor Rio de Janeiro suburb falls in love again when he finds a woman of approximately the same age.

Young executive woman returns to small town of Dois Córregos and remembers the time, in the late 1960s, when she met her uncle there, a man who was running away from the military dictatorship ruling Brazil at the time.

The real story of Quilombo Olho d'Água from Serra do Talhado, in the state of Paraíba, Brazil, which became institutionally isolated from the rest of the country. Quilombos were runaway slave communities in colonial Brazil.

When a doctor decides to carry out an AIDS prevention program inside Latin America’s largest prison: the Casa de Detenção de São Paulo - Carandiru, he meets the future victims of one of the darkest days in Brazilian History when the State of São Paulo’s Military Police, with the excuse for law enforcement, shot to death 111 people. Based on real...

The tensions experienced by three different people during the military dictatorship in Brazil: a politician, a revolutionary and a common citizen.

A customs agent, Dr. Amnésio, examines some reels of film, a documentary Orson Welles made about Brazil, and tries to confiscate the material. Then, a party in which repression agents celebrate their victory against freedom and creativity.

A boy is left alone in a Jewish neighborhood in the year of 1970, where both world cup and dictatorship happen in Brazil.

In Bahia, in the late '60s, the alienated college student Lula spends his time protesting in the university, but without political orientation, wandering on the streets, smoking grass, trying to be an actor and having sex. Meanwhile, a common young man stalks women on the streets trying to have intercourse with them.

Many stories revolving around a poor couple who, in spite of hating each other, still live together under the same roof.