Bruno Barreto was 20 years old when he injected new life into Brazilian cinema and announced Sônia Braga to the world with this sensuous comedy-fantasy, based on the brilliant Jorge Amado’s 1966 novel. Co-starring José Wilker (Bye Bye Brazil) and featuring music by Chico Buarque.

Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s impassioned adaptation of the novel by Graciliano Ramos, which follows an itinerant family traversing a drought-stricken sertão of northeastern Brazil, is considered one of the most important works of Brazilian cinema.

In one of Cinema Novo godfather Carlos Diegues’s most popular films, a motley crew of traveling performers entertains a wide range of audiences across Brazil’s northwestern Amazonian landscape. Accordionist Ciço (Fábio Júnior) and his wife Dasdô (Zaira Zambelli) join the rollicking caravan, leading to a string of adventures.

Roberto Santos’s Cinema Novo western follows the mythical “hero’s journey” of Augusto Matraga (Leonardo Villar), a violent farmer who is betrayed by his wife and nearly killed. After he is rescued by a pair of farmers, Matraga devotes his life to contrition—until the opportunity for revenge arrives.

Starring Alan Arkin and Pedro Cardoso, Bruno Barreto’s Oscar-nominated political thriller chronicles the 1969 abduction of the United States Ambassador to Brazil.

A vividly unsettling mixture of sexploitation sleaze and hard-boiled melodrama, Bruno Barreto’s follow-up to Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands centers on a doomed romance set against the backdrop of a wanton killing spree in Rio’s Copacabana.

Set in 1950s–60s Rio amid Brazil’s brewing military coup, the turbulent relationship between American poet Elizabeth Bishop (Miranda Otto) and architect Lota de Macedo Soares (Glória Pires) offers a unique perspective on this period in Brazil’s history.

Arguably one of the greatest films about soccer, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s debut feature is a form-shifting documentary portrait of his country’s beloved bow-legged dribbler Mané Garrincha.

A pivotal film from one of the key figures of Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement, Entranced Earth is an urgent and poetic account of political corruption, the systems that shape it, and the challenges of active citizenship in times of political upheaval.

Luiz Carlos Barreto’s directorial debut—assembled from hundreds of hours of footage with Cinema Novo editor Eduardo Escorel (Entranced Earth, Macunaíma, among many others)—tells the story of the Brazilian team’s first three World Cup wins with the record-breaking footballer as its protagonist.

Based on Graciliano Ramos’s posthumously published memoirs, this extraordinarily ambitious film from Nelson Pereira dos Santos centers on Ramos (Carlos Vereza) sinking ever deeper into a bizarre nightmare after he is locked up with other political prisoners in Rio de Janeiro and then, eventually, with all stripes of inmates on a remote island.

The first Brazilian film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in more than 30 years, Fábio Barreto’s romantic literary melodrama is a complex study of love and ambition at the dawn of the 20th century.

Set in a pre-Lula Brazil, this road film dramatizes the true story of a man and his family traveling across the country on bikes in search of an elusive job paying 1,000 Brazilian reais. International star Wagner Moura (Elite Squad, Narcos) stars in one of his breakthrough roles.