City of God (2002)

Tw­o­ b­o­y­s gr­o­w­i­ng u­p i­n a vi­o­l­e­nt ne­i­ghb­o­r­ho­o­d o­f R­i­o­ de­ Jane­i­r­o­ take­ di­ffe­r­e­nt paths: o­ne­ b­e­co­m­e­s a pho­to­gr­aphe­r­, the­ o­the­r­ a dr­u­g de­al­e­r­.

Tropa de Elite (2007)

aka: Elite Squad

In 1997, before the visit of the pope to Rio de Janeiro, Captain Nascimento from BOPE (Special Police Operation Battalion) is assigned to eliminate the risks of the drug dealers in a dangerous slum nearby where the pope intends to be lodged. Captain Nascimento is trying to find a man to replace him because his wife is pregnant and he intends to quit the command and become a trainer of the new recruits. Meanwhile, the two idealistic friends Neto and Matias join the Military Police force expecting to become honest policemen and fight the criminals. However, they see only corruption, lack of competence and stupid bureaucracy in the Military Police, and after a serious incident in the Morro da Babilônia, they decide to join the BOPE. The lives of Capitain Nascimento, Neto and Matias are entwined along the next months, first in the tough training period and then in action against drug dealers.

Carandiru (2003)

Film based on real life experiences of doctor Drauzio Varella inside dreadful State penitentiary Carandiru, in São Paulo, Brazil, while he was doing a social work of Aids prevention. There he found hundreds of convicts living under degrading conditions. The situation came to a climax in 1992, when in order to smother a rebellion, police force killed 111 men. Written by lukejoplin@infolink.com.br 145mins
12 wins & 16 nominations
BRAZIL

Romance (2008)

Stage director and actor, Pedro (Wagner Moura) falls in love with Ana (Letícia Sabatella), his love partner in the play ”Tristan and Iseult.” Behind the curtains, the couple collides with the obstacles to contemporary love: passion, jealousy, routine… Is a happy reciprocate love possible?

O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias (2006)

aka: The Year My Parents Went on Vacation

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

Casa de Areia (2005)

Casa de Areia: A woman is taken along with her mother in 1910 to a far-away desert by her husband, and after his passing, is forced to spend the next 59 years of her life hopelessly trying to escape it.

Muita Calma Nessa Hora (2010)

aka: Easy Does It
aka: Easy Does It (Muita Calma Nessa Hora)

Three young friends, Tita (Andréia Horta), Mari (Gianne Albertoni) and Aninha (Fernanda Souza) decide to change their situations and travel to a beach place for a weekend. On the road, they meet Estrella (Débora Lamm), a hippie that wants a hide to try to find her unknown father. Together, they will live hilarious, absurd and moving situations. More than a change the air, they change themselves.

Filme do Desassossego (2010)

aka: Disquiet
aka: Easy Does It (Muita Calma Nessa Hora)

It is late night in a café. A typical young intellect in his early twenties with sharp black eyes peering through black steel framed glasses is muttering that the modern method of measuring time is wrong and staring at a young man who is slouched with a face that looks pale, indifferent, and worried, all at the same time. Modernist poet Fernando Pessoa, who had keen observations of the dailiness of modern times in Lisbon in the 1910s, The Book of Disquiet, which Pessoa wrote in 1913, and the character of Bernardo Soares, into whom Pessoa projected his identity, all come to life in Lisbon in the 21st century through this film. The film is based on The Book of Disquiet, a diary about the distance between feelings of loneliness and the monotonous reality of daily life written by Bernardo Soares who goes back and forth between the accountant's office where works as an intern and his room, both of which are located on Rua dos Douradores in Lisbon, and may have been an impossible project to bring to the big screen; much like Joseph Strick’s attempt with James Joyce's Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Nevertheless, João Botelho began this project that everyone advised him against with the conviction that the quality of cinematic time, which resists the chronological flow of time and is able to illustrate daily life in a fragmented and musical rhythm, was the optimal vessel in presenting the extratemporel text that refuses to be confined to the limitations of a ‘book’. The characters in the film and the additional incidents become existences themselves in no time and become a part of the present of 2010.

Central Station (1998)

aka: Central do Brasil
aka: Easy Does It (Muita Calma Nessa Hora)

An emotive journey of a former school teacher, who write letters for illiterate people, and a young boy, whose mother has just died, in search for the father he never knew.

Director:
Walter Salles

113 min