Brazilian Documentary Movies

Three times a memory.

November 26, 2005. The day Grêmio defeated his opponent in enemy territory with seven men on the pitch. Warriors covered with the ever-victorious sacred mantle of three colors. No team in the world has the determination, the spirit of claw and the bravery typical of the gaucho as the Immortal Tricolor. Facing diversities is part of the culture and history of this club that fills the Rio Grande do Sul with pride and joy. Only Grêmio would be able to overcome the difficulties of this battle and make history as Brazilian Champion of Series B. An epic that the tricolor nation will never tire of remembering, reviving and celebrating. The living, real story of who was there. Exciting testimonials and exclusive images will make you, gremista, get emotional once more, as if you were in the Estádio dos Aflitos.

The film gets into the underworld of crimes involving homophobia, soccer organized fans, and gangs in Sao Paulo city. It shows the team’s work routine of DECRADI, the only unit specialized in this field, as they search for people who have made hate speech into cruel murders.

One night seven years ago, Rafael came home after work and discovered that people he did not know had come looking for him. He immediately fled, without looking back. From that moment on, his life changed, as if that night had never ended. One evening, around an improvised fire near a factory, he decides to confide his journey to a stranger. Rafael’s intimate account meets the collective testimony of an entire nation oppressed by poverty, police repression and institutional corruption.

Documentary about samba musician from Bahia Clementino Rodrigues, aka Riachão.

A group embarks on a mission to investigate the process of creating a habit. They challenge themselves to create a reading habit by forcing each other to read daily for five weeks.

Paula, Beatriz, Giu and Fernando live in one of the poorest favelas of São Paulo. A world of marginalization and despair, in which they struggle for their rights as transgenders, but also for survival: according to the statistics from the Transgender Europe NGO, Brazil is the nation with the highest number of murders of transgender people each year. The choice to experience your body in complete freedom is a revolutionary concept and highly risky in this context. It is an affirmation of one's being. it is no coincidence that one of them, who has begun the transition phase writes in his diary: "Each hormone pill is a declaration of ownership of my body. After each pill, I feel much better in my own skin". This movie shows their daily life, their struggles and protests in a world where ignorance becomes oppression and hate: in a word transphobia.

A batch of 110 love letters exchanged by two lovers in the 1950s, discovered in Mato Grosso do Sul, is the starting point for this film.

In Fortaleza, Brazil, loving, drinking and singing. The return home, braving stray dogs. And taking photos, up to the moment the plastic camera bought in 2013 gives up the ghost.

An albino boy named Sanã lives on the island of Lençóis, an untouched paradise in northeastern Maranhão state. Surrounded by dunes, he is mimicked in a very white landscape, under a scalding sun from which he cannot escape. In this microcosm ruled by wind and the tides, Sanã builds his own private world.

Among the many victims of the military dictatorship that raged in Brazil from 1964 to 1985, a small group of guerilla fighters – Chael, Roberto, Reinaldo and Dora – got arrested, tortured, some of them killed or forced into exile. Before and after their arrest, during their torture sessions, the police photographed them. Together with the official reports, these photos are the material Anita Leandro worked on from the inside to bring these four people’s fate out of oblivion.

The directors take five old VHS tapes documenting the Ãwas customs back to the tribe.

Ivan is a young Brazilian delinquent going through a probationary programme. An electronic shackle controls his location, but not his thoughts. Documentary about a man on home prison.

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Made in the "Boca do Lixo" district in São Paulo, this work explores the world of women prostitutes in downtown São Paulo. The author allows the narrative to be led by the interviewees themselves, removing the reporter's voice and intervening as little as possible in the editing of the testimonies. At a time when AIDS was primarily associated with gay men, most of the prostitutes say they don't believe they can be infected and refuse to use condoms. One of them shares that she used to be a madam and a drug dealer, but now lives like an ordinary worker, working from 10 to 7 and raising her children. Another recalls her time as a domestic worker, earning in one month what she now makes in a single day as a prostitute. The soundtrack features songs by Milton Nascimento and Mutantes.

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Vou Rifar Meu Coração is a documentary about the performers and the followers of Brazilian romantic music – also known as brega (kitsch), often called "cheesy" by critics and the wealthy elite. Frequently associated with bad taste and poor quality, the style is admired by the lower working class, or unemployed population, originally from rural origins, banished to the cities in search of work and a better life. Using the music as a catalyst, this documentary shows the sentiments, love, suffering and sexuality of the fans and their idols, creating a scenario that reveals their practices and desires.

In the ending of 19th century Brazil was boiling. The end of slavery, the arrival of immigrants and urbanization moved the country. In this scenario, football comes from England with the young Charles Miller and undergoes a revolution with the magical feet of Arthur Friedenreich.

The film depicts part of Priest Donizetti Tavares de Lima's trajectory in a little town in the State of São Paulo called Tambaú, where he performed a series of miracles.

Blurring borders between documentary and fiction, this film portrays a few moments from the lives of three people from Belo Horizonte: a transsexual prostitute and academic, a Hare Krishna soccer fan and a would-be writer.

Non-communication can emerge through different ways, whether by conflict, language, or culture. In Giuliano Robert's film it happens through the interference of speech: a hearing mother describes the beginning of a communication process with her deaf son. Based on the mother's experiences, Márcia, the documentary is conducted by her son, Giuliano, in search of a connection with a culture which, through lack of information and access, silences other modes of communication.

The documentary follows the campaign of 6 candidates to the municipal legislative council of the city of Rio de Janeiro (population of approximately 6 million) in Brazil, in the 90 days preceding election day. All of them dispute their first election, but only two of them will be successful.

In this "fake documentary", a doctor returns to Brazil after his studies in Paris. Setting out to practice Medicine, he becomes an indigenous messiah and, in time, a cannibal.

Dona Amélia is an Angolan refugee from the war who started her life anew in Olinda, in the Northeast of Brazil. From her photograph mural, her Brazilian daughter goes in search of her roots, divided between the family memories and the manifestations of African origin that she encounters along the way.

The life and work of poet Antonio Gonçalves da Silva, better known as Patativa do Assaré, one of the most recognized and celebrated popular poets of national poetics. A look at the political side of his acts, the writing process of his poems and their importance for Brazilian culture, narrated through testimonials given, at various times, by their family, friends and admirers.

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This film touches on political thought, worldview, as well as the direct actions of a group of militants from autonomous movements in the Federal District of Brazil, from 2005 to 2013.

Cássia Eller Rejane. Cássia Eller. Cássia. A powerful restless force on stage, shined herself out of it. One of the greats of Brazilian music, Cássia Eller marked the 1990s and shocked the country with her early death in 2001. A film about the singer, the mother, the woman who exposed her personal life and broke barriers, leaving a beautiful social and artistic legacy.

four-year history of the transformation of the centenary Palmeiras club.

In 1959, disgraced intergalactic agent WA4 receives a mission: to come to the Earth and kill the president Juscelino Kubitschek on the day of Brasília's inauguration. But his ship is lost in time and lands in 2016 in Ceilândia — a Black suburb of Brasilia — on the verge of Dilma Rousseff's impeachment.

The series “Mundo da Lua”, produced by TV Cultura in the 90s in Brazil, returns in another logbook by Lucas Silva e Silva. The documentary “Diário de Bordo de uma Viagem à Infância” is the meeting of those who were in front of and behind the cameras, telling the backstage of the series, and also the fans who followed on TV.

Documentary on one of Brazil's most controversial personalities: Getúlio Vargas, an ex-president.

Young, gifted and black! In an act of self-empowerment, a group of young Black people, mainly first and second generation immigrants from the Caribbean, have occupied the public space of the Toronto underground to perform their agitprop concept of edutainment – poets, rappers, singers and musicians.

Didactic documentary on the History of Brazil

Some people seem to have come into the world to confuse, annoy, swim against the current, like the guys from Gangrena Gasosa, the first and only Sarava Metal band of the universe. "Desagradável" covers all the 23 years of the band. A special reunion of people that stirred the underground scene of 90's until today. All the legends detailed in a film that will show the most shameful chapters in history of Brazilian Rock. Jello Biafra, Jão and João Gordo, BNegão, Marcelo D2, Anjo Caldas, Dado Villa-Lobos, Rafael Ramos, Fabio from Garage, Marcos Bragatto, Tom Leão, Pedro Só, Adilson Pereira, Larry Antha and the former members (more than 15!) recalls the regrettable moments that Sarava Metal happened in their lives. Archive images, photos and videos to prove, once for all, that "Home Saint makes miracles too".

The film accompanies the investigation of the historian Sidney Aguilar after the discovery of bricks marked with Nazi swastikas in the interior of São Paulo. They then discover a horrifying fact that during the 1930s, fifty black and mullato boys were taken from an orphanage in Rio de Janeiro to the farm where the bricks were found. There they were identified by numbers and were submitted to slave labour by a family that was part of the political and economic elite of the country and who did not hide their Nazi sympathizing ideals.

In 1965 a VW Beetle is sold in São Paulo, Brazil. Forty years later, the car ends up in a Recife scrapyard in the northeast, with the license plate KFZ-1348. The documentary “The Beetle KFZ-1348” presents the stories of this car through its eight owners, whose lives show a unique portrait of a country.

Waving the flag that states every film is political, Vincent Carelli visibilizes in this documentary the cause of the Guarani-Kaiowá: a group of indigenous people that fear their lands, located in the Mato Grosso do Sul, will be confiscated by the State. A territorial conflict born more than one hundred years ago, during the Paraguay war. While fighting against the Brazilian Congress in order not to be evicted from their homes, the 50.000 indigenous people demand the demarcation of the space that belongs to them. With some rigorous investigative work, the Brazilian director tells with his own voice of the social and political injustices suffered by the Guarani people through material he filmed over the course of more than forty years. The archive images, both color and black and white, reveal the crudeness with which they coexist every day: among the violation of their civil rights and the guts with which they confront the usurpers.

Osvaldão, a guerrilla leader, is hidden in the woods with guns in his hands, pursued by thousands of soldiers. He is feared by the military dictatorship and adored by the people. The film tells the trajectory of this boxing champion who became commander of the Araguaia Guerrilla.

Develops from the life, work and memory of Gianfrancesco Guarnieri, one of the most important names in the history of Brazilian theater, to examine the courses of dramaturgy and politics in the last decades. Guarnieri, besides being a TV star, was also seen as the synthesis of the politically engaged artist in Brazil. His sons, also actors, saw a separation between art, work, and politics. As he investigates the portraits of two generations, grandson and director Francisco aims to understand the place of his own generation in history, in art and the world as a whole.