The best Irene Stefânia’s movies

An extended research tour of US university film programs introduced dos Santos to the American avant-garde filmmakers, among them Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage, who would directly inspire his formally radical adaptation of an allegorical short story about adultery and colonialism by Guilherme de Figueiredo. Filmed in both Manhattan and Brazil and set against the background of the Vietnam War and its protests, Hunger for Love uses a rigorously abstract soundtrack and narrative structure to evoke the acute paranoia of the period building up to the December 1968 military coup that tipped Brazil perilously close to a conservative dictatorship. With its harsh critique of the decadent tendencies of the Sixties counterculture, Hunger for Love offers a key expression of the self-consciously “ideological” phase of Cinema Novo. -Harvard Film Archive

A man who works as a driver for a cladestine revolutionary organization has an opportunity to make a big score.

Chronicles the life of a 17 year-old girl living in the upper-class Rio de Janeiro neighbourhood of Ipanema. Márcia lives a life of parties and spend her days among bohemians, musicians and intellectuals. While seeming happy in the outside, she's extremely anguished inside. Based on the famous song by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes.

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

In a small town in the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil, a woman rebels against local morality after her child dies, with tragic results.

In the underworld of "Boca do Lixo" in São Paulo, a heterogeneous group of prostitutes turns an alley into a meeting point where customers are attracted. They are women who sell themselves to men of all classes. Surrounded by drunks, addicts, bandits, drug dealers and pimps, together they form a gallery of characters put together by affliction and disappointment. Cora, an older woman who works to support her paralytic son. Beth, kind of a leader, who had to prostitute herself at an early age after leaving her small country town. Sônia, the most intelligent of the group, who lets herself be exploited by a ruffian. Brigite, daughter of factory workers. Vera, who just started in the profession. In addition to the drama of these women, there are many others who give themselves daily to customers who ignore their fate

In another literary adaptation – this time Machado de Assis’ novella O Alienista – and his first color film, dos Santos unleashes an extravagant, maddening excoriation of Brazil’s military dictatorship of the 1970s. As usual, the director exploits all cinematic constituents in his palette – a radically intrusive and discordant soundtrack, non sequitur editing, exaggerated camera angles and all manner of carnivalesque pageantry – to illustrate the tale of a doctor/priest on a mission to discover truth through the study of madness. The population of his asylum grows as his definition of sanity fluctuates until it finally threatens to incorporate the entire town. The film’s own irrational reversals and allegorical codes gleefully mock the arbitrariness of authoritarianism in all its varied guises. -Harvard Film Archive

Documentary on famous Brazilian actresses, female directors and the role of women in Brazilian film history.