Movies: Helena Ignez

"Portraits and excerpts from Brazilian films from all times. Actors, directors and images that affirm cinema."...

Daniel is a taxi driver who’s married to Adalgisa. When she starts acting in low-budget movies, he forbids her from seeing their son, Joaquim. For more than a decade, Daniel nurtures a feeling of revenge for his ex-wife, which gains strength when the...

Born and raised in the misery of Brazilian slums, Jorge becomes a luxury house burglar in São Paulo and gets nicknamed "The Red Light Bandit" by the sensationalist press. In addition to wearing a red flashlight, he talks to his hostages in an irrever...

Released from the Mental Health Wing of São Paulo State Penitentiary after forty years, the sadistic undertaker Zé do Caixão is back on the streets, haunted by ghostly visions and spirits of past victims but still set upon the goal that sent him to p...

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 t...

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 ...

In a small town in Minas Gerais, the arrival of a young priest causes a commotion in the conservative atmosphere of the place, aggravated by the sudden attraction this priest feels for a beautiful girl. This forbidden love affair soon turns into an u...

Two maids decide to rebel against the society that oppresses them and start murdering their own mistresses....

Experimental documentary short that debates over Rogério Sganzerla's Brazilian cult classic "The Red Light Bandit"....

The story of a civil servant who lives with his elderly mother. Falling in love with a corrupt politician's young and rich daughter, he abandons himself to crazy and violent situations....

Bressane’s first color film, shot in the home of the artist Elyseu Visconti. Part of it is missing sound and final editing because the director was forced to leave Brazil. Horror and humor to deal with the subject of insanity: “In the end everyone le...

A short documentary on Belair, an independent Brazilian film company that lasted for only five months in 1970....

Based on true events in Rio de Janeiro, in 1960, when a gang having the infamous outlaw Tião Medonho as a leader performed a sensational railroad hold-up on a train carrying a small fortune....

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 ...

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....

Follows the story of Opinião, a theatre group created in 1964 during the early Brazilian dictatorship period to oppose the government through artistic performances. Considered the first left-wing response to the dictatorship, the group gathered now f...

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 tha...

Sônia and her homosexual brother are both believed by their mother to be possessed by the devil. She works as a prostitute in the streets of Copacabana and he’s a servant who falls madly in love with his employer....

Spider, a banker, lives with three women. This tycoon is a caricature of Brazil's bourgeoisie, his trajectory is the starting point for an essay on the mental underdevelopment of Brazilian elites, in which black humor sets the tone for sharp criticis...

"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....