10 great Brazilian films directed by women

Brazilian cinema is undergoing a moment of unparalleled international projection, with I’m Still Here earning the country its first-ever Oscar in 2025 and The Secret Agent landing an impressive four nominations earlier this year. Yet, this acclaim is largely attached to male auteurs such as Walter Salles, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Karim Aïnouz and Gabriel Mascaro, whose films manage to break the precious bubble of major festival competitions.

But the South American giant also boasts a rich, talented legacy of female filmmakers. From Cléo de Verberena, who made history in 1931 as the first woman to direct a feature film in the country, with O mistério do Dominó Preto, to Suzana Amaral’s sensitive portrayals of Brazilian artistry and creativity with A Semana de 22 (1970) and her seminal 1985 Clarice Lispector adaptation Hour of the Star, and Ana Carolina, who directed an insightful trilogy examining the role of the women in Brazilian society with Mar de Rosas (1978), Das Tripas Coração (1982) and Sonho de Valsa (1987).

Since the country’s Resumption Cinema, the period between 1995 and 2002 that saw national production receive a historical boost from public investment, Brazil has seen a hungry new generation of female directors break into the scene with singular works mixing a sharp grasp of a rich anthropological tapestry with fresh formal playfulness. Filmmakers such as Juliana Rojas, Anita Rocha da Silveira and Renata Pinheiro tackled genre offerings examining issues of class, sexuality and religious intolerance, while the country’s booming north-east has seen bold voices such as Nara Tião and Glenda Nicácio claim back narratives of regional identity.

The selection below offers a taste of the broad catalogue of Brazilian films directed by women, and is sure to whet the appetite of those looking for a place to start.

Director: Vera de Figueiredo

Almost half a century before Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta’s Dry Ground Burning (2022) saw a group of rebellious women on revving motorcycles cross the arid backlands of Brasília, Vera de Figueiredo opened her defiant Feminino Plural with a similar image: seven female riders cutting through the oppressive asphalt of Brazil’s most iconic highway, Via Dutra.

Figueiredo was a key exponent of 1970s Brazilian experimental cinema, and her film follows the women on their drive towards Rio de Janeiro’s densely urbanised Baixada Fluminense. The director frames the bustling rhythm of the metropolis through tangled electric wires, moving from the homogenous mass of the big city towards the sparser, almost bucolic rhythms of the countryside. There, the septet melts into a commune of other free-spirited souls, with Figueiredo drinking from the fountain of Agnès Varda’s feminist counter-cinema to draw a lyrical yet confrontational response to the country’s violently oppressive military dictatorship.

Director: Adélia Sampaio

In a curious mirrored image between the two large American potencies split by the equator, the first films to be directed by Black female filmmakers in Brazil and in the US have been lesbian love stories: Cheryl Dunye’s lauded classic The Watermelon Woman (1996), and Adélia Sampaio’s Cursed Love, which came over a decade earlier but remains much lesser-known.

The crime drama revolves around Fernanda’s trial, where she stands accused of murdering her wife, Sueli. The proceedings are turned into an ideological spectacle thanks to the same-sex nature of the relationship, with Sampaio cleverly harnessing the classic courtroom drama to tell a still modern story about queer love at the height of Brazil’s dictatorship. The director further complicates her narrative by broaching issues of class and religion, and, while watching an angered lawyer wag his condemnatory finger at Fernanda, one can hear in the venom of the words uttered four decades ago a hauntingly familiar contemporary rhetoric.

Director: Raquel Gerber

Brazil is home to the largest Black contingent outside of Africa and a country still very much grappling with its recent slavery past. Spanning over a decade, Raquel Gerber’s Ôrí attempts to trace the emancipation of Brazil’s Black population through capturing a series of gatherings and conferences between the 1970s and 80s. It is also a fruitful collaboration with historian Beatriz Nascimento, whose life’s work looks at the physical and emotional ties between the South American country and Africa.

Titled after the Yoruba word that can be literally translated as ‘head’, but holds within a much more poetic hold on ideas of time and memory, the sprawling essay film exists somewhere between the objectivity of the archival and the elusiveness of an ever-evolving sense of identity and belonging. Culminating in the centenary of the abolition of slavery in Brazil, Gerber’s study remains both a vital resource and a moving ode to Black Brazilian culture and history.

Director: Lúcia Murat

Brazilian cinema found great recent success through explorations of its complex political past, with Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent broaching the military dictatorship that plagued the country between 1964 and 1985. Filmmaker Murat was one of the many to be tortured under the violent regime, later turning her camera to women who bravely stood against the military apparatus and crafting a docudrama that still stands as one of the seminal films about the period.

Shot by the great Walter Carvalho (Central Station, Carandiru), How Nice to See You Alive sees Murat employ actress Irene Ravache as a fictional alter ego and the conductor of a series of testimonies by eight women imprisoned and tortured during the military regime. The film opens with the pointed question “Why did we survive?” and ends with Ravache longingly staring outside, Murat framing her through the iron grills of her apartment window in a striking final shot that masterfully encapsulates the elusiveness of freedom.

Director: Laís Bodanzky

Before leaving Brazil to chase an international career that saw him star in films such as Love Actually (2003) and 300 (2006) in the 2000s, Rodrigo Santoro delivered two back-to-back career-making performances in Walter Salles’s Behind the Sun (2001) and Laís Bodanzky’s Brainstorm. The latter sees Santoro’s signature leading-man swagger disappear into Neto, a middle-class teenager sent to a mental institution by his conservative family after being caught with a marijuana cigarette in his pocket.

Shot in a vérité style on 16mm in a washed-out palette of greys, blues and greens, Brainstorm catapults the viewer to the bowels of institutionalised torture. Bodanzky steers away from the commonplace framing of Neto as a wronged martyr, prioritising a sensorial overload. She cranks up a loud rock score as the camera frames the teen’s sweat-stained face, the haunting truth of his sorrows effectively and piercingly staring back from under the sheen of overstylisation.

Directors: Kátia Lund and Fernando Meirelles  

In 2002, the visceral City of God stood out as one of the crown jewels of Brazil’s Resumption Cinema. The Shakespearean tale of two mortal drug-dealing enemies in a Rio de Janeiro favela would come to inspire names from Mbappé to Snoop Dogg to Romain Gavras, but it is often accredited only to Fernando Meirelles, who broke into ironclad Hollywood thanks to the film’s roaring success.

But City of God is co-directed by Kátia Lund, a filmmaker with a keen interest in prodding at how systemic failures feed the hungry mouth of violence. Lund had long looked at social marginalisation in her work before joining Meirelles for City of God, directing seminal music videos for Brazilian reggae rock band O Rappa – whose songs rage frustration at their mother nation – and working on documentaries like 1999’s News from a Personal War, examining urban violence in Rio’s slums. Lund may have come in later on the project and been shunned from the film’s Best Director nomination, but it is her sharp understanding of the thorny complexities of Rio’s violent underbelly that grants Meirelles’s vision its searing authenticity.

Director: Carolina Jabor

The term cancel culture would only become part of the popular lexicon in 2018, but the sinuous nature of suspicion and condemnation has long permeated great stories on the slipperiness of truth. Adapted by renowned screenwriter Lucas Paraizo from Josep Maria Miró’s Archimedes’ Principle, Jabor’s incisive drama sees a handsome swimming instructor accused of kissing a six-year-old boy.

At the time of release, Jabor’s game of accusations was compared to Thomas Vinterberg’s still recent The Hunt (2012). It’s a fitting parallel, but the Brazilian counterpart is less interested in placing pitchforks in the hands of mobsters-to-be than in languidly observing the brewing of an anger still somewhat curbed by upper-class politeness. The director’s use of the physical – from the sculpted body of the instructor to the sparse scenes featuring the young boy that lead the viewer to look for cues in the smallest of movements – further amplifies the carefully constructed tension of this moral fable.

Director: Iuli Gerbase

In an unnamed city in the Brazilian south, Giovana and Yago share an awkward breakfast after a one-night stand. As they begin to say their goodbyes, a deadly pink cloud appears outside the window. Suddenly, the two go from virtual strangers to building a long life together inside the cosy apartment turned biblical entrapment.

With poetic prescience, director Iuli Gerbase began working on her existential sci-fi about a lockdown a few years before the Covid-19 pandemic, with the film premiering at the Sundance Film Festival as masks covered anxious faces and the world stood still. That lack of distance might have made it harder to appreciate The Pink Cloud’s refined grasp on the dissonance of a limbo that at once numbs and exacerbates grand existential questions. Now, given a certain distance, Gerbase’s parable on the growing ache of modern disconnection is all the more impressive.

Directors: Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta

Adirley Queirós once called his work a feature of “ethnographic sci-fi”. The established Once There Was Brasília (2017) filmmaker is greatly curious about the malleability of aesthetics when drawing rich portrayals of communities living at the heart of Brazil’s vast land, in his hometown of Brasília. In the staggering Dry Ground Burning, Queirós enlists Joana Pimenta to tell a futuristic story set on the outskirts of Brazil’s capital. There, a collective of women makes money by turning crude oil into gasoline, riding Mad Max-ish motorcycles across the arid lands as they fight off rival cartels.

Queirós and Pimenta are great exponents of a burgeoning centre-west Brazilian cinema, their work traversing genres and playing with formalism to paint a picture of a diverse but still underrepresented region. Here, the duo crafts a matriarchal future where the revving of engines echoes the guttural anger of the marginalised and where the rising order riotously captures a post-Bolsonaro world by ushering the tyrant’s worst nightmare to the top of the pecking order: Black, queer, unrepentant women.

Director: Carolina Markowicz

São Paulo’s Markowicz has solidified herself as one of the most interesting – and successful – names of her generation, having directed only two feature films, but already stacking up awards at major international festivals. Her debut, Charcoal, is a rarely-balanced mix of satire and social drama that sees a small family in the countryside faced with a Trolley Problem-esque dilemma: would they rid themselves of a growing care burden by laying their bedridden patriarch to rest and replacing him with an Argentinian druglord desperately seeking refuge?

Neighboring Sounds (2012) breakout Maeve Jinkings beautifully embodies the permanent exhaustion of a repeatedly disappointed dreamer in a film that is at once excruciating in its suspense and a delight in its humour. Set in rural São Paulo, Markowicz also offers a banquet in terms of human and physical geography, mixing professional and non-professional actors that give her film a tangible sense of lived-in authenticity while never foregoing its tight grasp on genre.

City of God screens as part of our Brazil on Film season at BFI Southbank, running from 1 May to 30 June 2026.