Joel Barcellos

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

Cropped hair, a rosemary branch behind the ear, yellow shirt of shiny satin, he's behind the wheel of his car when passing by a woman who walks by the roadside. Strongly painted lips, printed dress with round skirt and red shoes matching the color of the lipstick, she catches his attention. He gives her a ride, the two of them stare in silence for a few moments. They introduce themselves to one another and between the two establishes an absurd dialogue and full of metaphors. And they are driving around in corners of Rio de Janeiro, to the sound of Noel Rosa and Lamartine Babo. Eva and Antena, she a seer, he, an assassin on the run, initiate an unusual case of love, a marginal love, where boredom often gives way to tragedy, creating the agony of a holiday spent in an abyss.

A weak-willed Italian man becomes a fascist flunky who goes abroad to arrange the assassination of his old teacher, now a political dissident.

A beautiful woman is found dead, with a peach in her mouth, a bite in her butt and without blood in the body. When other women are found dead in the same modus-operandi, the police gives the nickname of "Vampa" to serial killer. Detective Leôncio is assigned to investigate the murder together with fetishist photographer Oscar. Without any lead, they decide to follow a sexy and popular night-club dancer on the streets of São Paulo, trying to identify possible suspects.

This film seeks to rescue the role of filmmaker Neville D'Almeida by using many rare images, numerous interviews, vast archival and audiovisual material.

A mad scientist attempts to bring an ancient Egyptian mummy back to life.

A public relations man is invited to guide an American millionaire during his stay in Rio de Janeiro. He gets involved in the most bizarre situations, from orgiastic mega-parties to confrontations with the police, meetings with drug dealers and movie stars, facing corruption and even murder.

The events of Giuliano Sartori, correspondent from Genoa for a newspaper in the capital, involved in a complicated investigation set in a psychiatric clinic. Not a simple Italian thriller but a "Russian doll", an open story with different levels of reading and interpretation, in which the distance between the madness of authenticity of feelings and the sprawling social normality that leads to 'annulment of the person and loneliness. Collaborators on the subject and the script of the film are Bernardo Bertolucci and Enzo Carra.

A group of armed soldiers is sent to the Northeast of Brazil in an attempt to stop a famine-struck population from invading and stealing a food deposit in the dry backlands. While the alienation and insanity of people driven to hallucination by their latent hunger is conducted by the predictions of a religious figure, a truck driver observes the situation and remains torn between his friendship with the soldiers and his revolt against the lack of government action in fighting the misery that lingers over the region.

Passively facing the repression imposed by military dictatorship in Brazil in the 60s, a journalist gets into a personal crisis, aggravated by his love affair with an industrialist's wife, who doesn't want to leave her home because of her son

Life and death of the jesuit who fought for the peaceful relationship between colonists and the indigenous peoples of Brazil.

Six episodes set in and focusing on the history of Brasília, the capital of Brazil. Episode list: A Paisagem Natural (dir. Vladimir Carvalho), O Sinal da Cruz (dir. Pedro Jorge de Castro), A Volta de Chico Candango (dir. Roberto Pires), Além do Cinema do Além (dir. Pedro Anísio), Suíte Brasília (dir. Moacir de Oliveira) and A Capital dos Brasis (dir. Geraldo Moraes).

Edson is having an affair with a left-wing aspiring movie director during Brazil's military dictatorship years. He tries to get some easy money for her film, but ends up being arrested and tortured as his torturers suspect he's involved in a plot to overthrow the military government.

Tropico

University teacher investigates the life of a famous Brazilian musician, trying to discover the secret of mass communication through his songs and performances, while ultimately falling in love with one of his groupies.

Zulmira is an old mistress who lives in the neighborhood of Estacio, in Rio de Janeiro. One day she wakes up obsessed with the idea of dying. All she needs is a good coffin. A tribute to Leon Hirszman's "The Deceased", the first film starred by Fernanda Montenegro.

The hero without character is back. Here, two Macunaímas encounter with one mission in common which is to leave the place they're currently living: one is running away from the deforestation in the Amazon while the other got tired of living in heaven and wants to return to his land.

Encarnação

"Seven women on motorcycles, through Via Dutra, go to the Baixada Fluminense, a microcosm of Brazil. Diving into the memory and questioning the behavior imposed on women, they seek to rescue the strength of the feminine. The new woman, born in the Brazilian land, incorporates the Amazons and Santa Guerreira. At his side, the new man, more loose and creative. Closing the cycle, the initial road is resumed. " (HBH / QC)

In the village of Leva-e-Traz, the discovery of a oil field is responsible for a mass evasion of the townspeople. Left are the old and incapable for the extraction job. When the local priest announces he, too, is leaving the town, Satan emerge thrilled with the chance of overtaking the place.

Unable to endure the idea that he would go without punishment, a criminal's victim chases him the length and breadth of Brazil for a showdown.

Marquinhos is in his early 20s and lives in Copacabana with his petits bourgeois parents and older brother. He doesn't have a job, he doesn't go to school, he just lives on the spur of the moment, watches TV, plays soccer on the beach by day and goes out with his mates by night. He meets Irene, a 40 year-old woman and they have a love affair that is going to change his life - for a while.

Originally produced for German TV, Improvised and Purposeful is a firsthand look at the "Cinema Novo" movement (otherwise known as the 'Brazilian New Wave'). Director Joaquim Pedro de Andrade focuses on six Cinema Novo filmmakers working in Rio in 1967.

Couple whose marriage is at stake delve into the past, with the help of a diary and some home movies. In these movies, Helena, the woman's suicidal friend, has an important role.

Writer Sílvio Proença needs to travel to São Paulo in order to promote his new book. At the airport, he meets a group of old mates. With the boarding canceled due to a strong storm, the group goes to the apartment of Marialva, daughter of one of Proença's friends. Seduced by Marialva's music and charms, Proença spends the night there, where he wakes up the next day, completely naked. Still groggy from his hangover, he goes to pick up the bread left outside the apartment; that's when the wind closes the door and leaves him naked outside.

In search of a better life, Luzia leaves the Northeast of Brazil and goes to Rio de Janeiro, looking for her fiance who went first to pave their way. Alone in the Marvelous City, she is forced to accept the friendship and protection of Calunga and, later, the company of Inácio.

Plano B

The story of two brothers who are trying to farm in the Brazilian Amazon.

O Picapau Amarelo

Residents of the city of Parada 88, contaminated in 1994 due to the explosion of a chemical industry reactor, live in plastic tunnels, the only way of life that can guarantee their survival, since oxygen, which has become a good consumption, used needs to be reused so as not to generate more expenses. One day, Joaquim wins a lottery that gives him enough money to pay for his and his family's oxygen; but to claim the prize, he'll need to go to the ruins of the factory to collect news from a group of contamination experts adventurers posted there.

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.

After visiting a fortune teller, Zulmira is informed that a blonde woman will threaten her peace. After talking to her husband Toninho, she suspects that her cousin Glorinha may be that blonde.

In the year 2222, a former drug dealer is kept in a state of hibernation. Reanimated, he tells his story. Leader in the narcotics market, his situation was prosperous until, during a political change, the government legalized its use.

João, a playboy, spends his last day as a single in a resort hotel, where he seduces a teenager and gets involved with the casino singer.

In the early 17th century, the Dutch have occupied Bom Jesus village, the last native stronghold in the Pernambuco captaincy. An adventurer, João Fernandes Vieira, sees himself in the middle of a conflict, torn between joining his friend Mauricio de Nassau alongside the ruling Dutch and siding with his lover Ana Paes in the fight to free his homeland.

Ring whose previous owner was a prostitute with supernatural powers causes double personality in a young woman about to marry. After some time, her face gets disfigured, forcing her to wear a mask.

Biography of a Brazilian dancer who lived on an island and practiced nudism when it was forbidden by law.

A couple of filmmakers facing difficulties to make a film in the midst of an economic crisis, affecting the relationship between them.

The Beggars

Sant'Anna dos Pescadores

In hopes of unraveling the causes and cure for various forms of insanity, a psychiatrist in Brazil created the Museum of Images from the Unconscious in 1952. It gathered paintings and drawings made by mental patients from all over Brazil. Many of the works in the museum are paired with the case-histories of the patients who created them in this fascinating film.

Eldorado, a fictitious country in America, is sparkling with the internal struggle for political power. In the eye of this social convulsion, the jaded journalist Paulo Martins opposes two equally corrupt political candidates: a pseudopopulist and a conservative. In this context, Paulo is torn between the madness of the elite and the blind submission of the masses. But, in this complex tropical reality, nothing really is what it seems to be.

An overlook at the southern Rio de Janeiro neighborhoods, from the perspective of one of its most well-known places: Jardim de Alah, a group of squares on the middle of neighborhoods Ipanema and Leblon. There, people of different social classes interact together - workers who live in the Cruzada de São Sebastião building and the local bourgeois class who live in fancy condos. There, the rich and the poor unite in the same spirit.

The painter Tino, in professional and political crisis, receives a telegram from his mother-in-law, Selma, announcing her return from Europe. After his wife's death, Tino continues living with Selma, with whom he had ambiguous relations, which he now wants to sever. Weak at this impossible love, he asks the maid Enedina to lock him in his room. There, he revives memories through letters, notes and photographs. Selma's son João is waiting for her at the airport and dreams of loving fulfillment in his own mother's arms.

Worker Norival's life turns upside down when he is caught kissing his co-worker Catarina during work hours. He is fired for just cause and faces the hardships of the labor lawsuit he filed against the company.

Milionário and José Rico are robbed of their money and their fans' enthusiasm. But a female truck driver is out to help them.

Five segments about the hardships faced by people living in slums on hills in Rio de Janeiro.

Homeless children in the slums of Rio are driven out of their temporary shelters by ruthless gangsters in this somber drama. The kids survive by shining shoes, stealing, and cutting the strings of the kites to sell them later to others. Tired of life on the streets, one boy turns himself over to the police in hopes he will be sent to reform school in a last desperate attempt to survive. This feature from acclaimed Swedish director Arne Sucksdorff appeared at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival.

In his film Rua Aperana 52 Júlio Bressane describes the invention of a landscape, the topology of a corner of Rio de Janeiro. The film consists of a series of photographs taken between 1909 and 1955 by, among others, Bressane's parents at and around the address used as a title. These are interlarded with scenes from films made between 1957 and 2005, bringing the total fictional time the film covers to almost a century; one hundred years in which the winding road featured in almost every shot structures the new landscape behind the Aperana, which means 'wrong road'. Rua Aperana 52 is autobiographical, as it is a landscape from Bressane's youth, but it is also not so; it is more a multi-subjective mythology of a place seen through all those films and photographs. Bressane refers to his editing as an intuitive form of thinking aimed at evoking moods which make the viewer the new witness of the fictional landscape. A fiction about a fiction,

A three-episode anthology film based on short stories by Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos.

This controversial film from director Glauber Rocha records the funeral of his friend, major Brazilian painter Emiliano Di Cavalcanti.

Rua Descalça

Rio de Janeiro is a city of very well defined contrast between the seafront, narrow, where the rich live and very close, the hills with their slums, where life changes very quickly in the short space of time.

Men work in a quarry on the edge of a hill where a slum is located, of which they are residents. The slope is blown up, advancing to the land near the shacks. Slum dwellers are warned that new explosions can cause damage. The community decides to place itself on the slope, preventing another explosion; without attitude, the foreman gives up on blowing up the hill.

During a flight, passengers confront their aspirations, frustrations, fears, wishes and fears, mixing up reality and fiction.

Expedito, after being abandoned by his parents, became Zefa's adopted son until he became a man and started earning his living as an independent fisherman. As soon as he finds out that Zefa is very ill, Expedito runs back home and finds his adoptive mother in agony. At the edge of the bed, a mysterious woman, who claims to be Death, sits.

Presença de Marisa

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 famous Brazilian artists such as Nara Leão, Maria Bethânia, João do Vale and Millôr Fernandes.

The story of the rivalry between the twin sisters Ruth and Raquel takes place in the fictional Pontal D'Areia, on the coast of Rio de Janeiro. They have very different personalities. Ruth is sweet, calm and has a good heart. Raquel, on the other hand, is selfish, aggressive and mean.

18 years old Engraçadinha starts a secret love affair with her cousin Sílvio, who's engaged to her best friend Letícia, who is secretly in love with Cutie Pie. Twenty years later, Cutie Pie is a deeply religious married woman who's afraid her teenage daughters might end up making the same mistakes she did in the past.