Kleber Mendonça Filho

Filmmaker Jafar Panahi recalls the cinephilia of his youth from the surreal remove of the 2025 New York Film Festival.

Brazil, 1977. Marcelo, a technology expert in his early 40s, is on the run. Hoping to reunite with his son, he travels to Recife during Carnival but soon realizes that the city is not the safe haven he was expecting.

Downtown Recife’s classic movie palaces from the 20th century are mostly gone. That city area is now an archaeological site of sorts that reveals aspects of life in society which have been lost. And that’s just part of the story.

Behind the scenes of Bacurau (2019)'s shooting and pre-production. With exclusive images, directors Kléber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles show how they made the film an audience and critical success.

Bacurau, a small town in the Brazilian sertão, mourns the loss of its matriarch, Carmelita, who lived to be 94. Days later, its inhabitants notice that their community has vanished from most maps.

Clara, a vibrant former music critic and widow with flowing tresses is the only remaining apartment owner in a beautiful older building targeted for demolition by ruthless luxury high-rise developers. Clara proves to be a force to be reckoned with as she thwarts the builders plans to kick her out of the apartment.

Recife, undergoing so many changes, was the scene of a party of joy and tension, sports and politics. A happy experience, but full of the contradictions that make Brazil be Brazil and here wins the face and the space of Recife.

An independent private security firm arrives at a middle-class neighborhood in Recife, Brazil.

A not very good little digital still camera, our little neighbours and a football. Home movie.

In tropical Recife, in northeastern Brazil, temperatures drop to impossible lows and the inhabitants have to adapt. This 'mockumentary' gradually turns critical, looking at the climate, urban development and social interaction from every angle. Does a ray of sun pierce the clouds, after all?

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.

A small-scale romantic love story, shot with a digital camera in black & white and in a documentary style. We follow the conversation between two lovers, each on a different side of the world; he is in Recife, she is in Kyiv. On one side is dark, on the other light, but both experience the same emotions and hence feel nearness and contact.

A middle-class family living in a house filled with superfluous electronic appliances see the arrival of a new item, a 29" TV-set.

A mother gives her daughter a box full of old, coloured little vinyl records. The daughter may listen to them, but she should never, ever, play the green one.

The urban legend of the "cotton girl." The dead girl appeared in the bathrooms of schools to terrorize children.

Middle class man surrounded by fear and paranoia become prisoner of his own world.

This work, an experimental film, is the result of extensive archival research whose mission was to find the most absurd commercials on TV in Pernambuco, memorable VTs in the 80s and 90s marked by aesthetic rudeness and sometimes naive communication. This film became a champion of pirated copies in rental stores across the country, still on VHS.

A woman leaves her apartment to go pick up a newspaper, opening and closing a multiple of locks on her way out and back.

A film photo-montage about an old house that belonged to a traditional local family that was later demolished.

Short documentary about Cine Art Palácio in Recife-PE, Brazil.

Early experiments with VHS. Metros kinda look the same.