10 great Cinema Novo films

Literally meaning ‘new cinema’, Brazil’s Cinema Novo emerged in the wake of Italian neorealism and the new waves that followed, trading industrial for artisanal production methods in search of the ‘real’ Brazil of urban favelas and the scorched northeastern sertão. But unlike its European counterparts, Cinema Novo was inseparable from an awareness of Brazil as a neocolonial country, serving as a model for other ‘poor’ and ‘imperfect’ cinemas across Latin America and the then-called Third World.

These “sad, ugly, screaming, desperate films,” as Glauber Rocha described them in his 1965 manifesto ‘An Aesthetics of Hunger’, insisted on a direct link between form and content: in the face of an intolerable reality, only an aggressive aesthetics would do. Written a year after Brazil’s military coup, Rocha’s manifesto still carried the movement’s belief that cinema could change the world, or at least Brazil. As censorship tightened, the revolutionary mood gave way to a more pessimistic tone, though Cinema Novo would still find one last gasp of breath, now in fully allegorical mode, in the emerging Tropicalist movement of the late 1960s.

Cinema Novo’s brief history bore in its shifting identity the imprint of Brazil’s turbulent political decade. But like a historical monument itself, its legacy has reverberated through Brazilian film history ever since: mocked by the Cinema Marginal, recycled in the 1990s Retomada (the Brazilian Film Revival), and continually reassessed to this day. As a product of its time, the movement may now seem largely oblivious to racial and gender issues, its nationalist project at odds with the contemporary reign of identity politics. Yet its contribution to Brazilian cinema remains unsurpassable, and its collective aspirations feel more urgent than ever.

Directors: Miguel Borges, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Carlos Diegues, Marcos Farias and Leon Hirszman

An anthology film of five episodes, Five Times Favela followed in the wake of Rio, 40 Degrees (1955) and Rio, Northern Zone (1957), both directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos. Together, these films underscore the centrality of Rio favelas as a site for social critique in Cinema Novo, as well as the influence of Italian neorealism in both modes of production and narrative tropes, including child protagonists. 

Produced by Rio’s Popular Cultural Centre (CPC), the film functioned as a laboratory for emerging Cinema Novo directors such as Carlos (or Cacá) Diegues, Leon Hirszman and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade. Its legacy is evident in the 2010 release of Five Times Favela, Now by Ourselves. Though produced with the involvement of Diegues, all episodes in the new film, as its title indicates, are directed by favela residents in an attempt to address a persistent critique of Cinema Novo: that its predominantly white, middle-class filmmakers had little to no experience of the realities they portrayed.

Director: Carlos Diegues

Part of Cinema Novo’s project was to dismantle the myth of Brazilians as inherently peaceful by recovering histories of resistance and revolt. Adapted from João Felício dos Santos’s book of the same title, Ganga Zumba, Cacá Diegues’s first feature, follows a group of enslaved people fleeing to Palmares, the largest of Brazil’s quilombos – autonomous settlements founded by escaped slaves during colonial times. 

By foregrounding Black experience and tracing its roots to Brazil’s centuries-old history of slavery, the film remains something of an outlier in Cinema Novo, which has been critiqued for sidelining racial issues. Its nearly all-Black cast is remarkable in itself, bringing together then-young artists whose impact on Black culture would prove immeasurable: Zózimo Bulbul (who also appears in Five Times Favela), the father of Black Cinema in Brazil; Cartola, the legendary samba composer; and, in the title role, a luminous Antônio Pitanga, one of the defining faces of Cinema Novo and Brazilian cinema as a whole.

Director: Nelson Pereira dos Santos

Based on Graciliano Ramos’s 1938 eponymous novel, Barren Lives stands as Cinema Novo’s most programmatic film, with theme, style and production methods in perfect consonance. Set in the northeast backlands, or the sertão, it follows a migrant family – including the dog Baleia – fleeing an oppressive landscape in search of opportunities in the city. For Cinema Novo filmmakers, the drought-stricken sertão offered an ideal setting. Its unforgiving environment both countered Brazil’s postcard image and exposed the country’s systemic neglect, including the unresolved agrarian question. 

Rather than offering a detached representation of place, Barren Lives immerses the viewer in its harshness. On the soundtrack, the screeching of an ox cart recurs throughout, heightening the sense of physical discomfort. Luiz Carlos Barreto’s celebrated cinematography, in turn, overexposes film stock in a blinding light that flattens and saturates the image. At times, the camera, mimicking the characters’ perspective, even points directly at the sun, collapsing the distance between depiction and experience in one of Cinema Novo’s most unrelenting visions of survival. 

Director: Glauber Rocha

At just 25, Glauber Rocha made Black God, White Devil, a film that would become the defining statement of Cinema Novo’s formal and political ambition. Hailed by many as Brazil’s greatest film, it is as maddening as it is exhilarating – an operatic kaleidoscope that swings between rapid-fire montage and choreographed long takes, classical music and narrative folk ballads, western iconography and epic theatre. 

Filmed in the backlands of Bahia, where the Battle of Canudos took place in the late 19th century, Black God, White Devil sets out to show that Brazil’s history was also marked by organised rebellion. In its final sequence, a cut turns the arid landscape into undulating sea, giving cinematic form to the utopian prophecy repeated throughout the film: “The sertão will turn to sea and the sea to sertão.” The poetic, revolutionary force of this transition remains one of the most powerful images in cinema history.

Director: Luis Sergio Person

Some readers might balk at this inclusion. Luis Sergio Person was not part of the relatively tight-knit Cinema Novo circle. But he was in dialogue with the movement, and his film, released at its height, echoes and reframes many of its concerns. Emerging in part as a rejection of the developmentalist ideology then in vogue in Brazil, Cinema Novo turned to those left behind by progress. São Paulo, Incorporated, by contrast, throws us right into the core of modernisation’s dehumanising machinery. 

In place of the rural peasant or slum dweller, we follow the young and ambitious Carlos (Walmor Chagas) as he grows increasingly alienated, sucked into the city’s unrelenting industrial march. The film’s fragmented structure mirrors his disintegration: the narrative jumps back and forth in time, while the city is framed through aerial views, reflective surfaces and vertiginous tracking shots crowded with passersby staring directly into the camera. “São Paulo will never stop growing,” one character remarks, and many will wish he wasn’t so right.

Director: Leon Hirszman

You’d think the 1953 play The Deceased, by Brazil’s foremost playwright Nelson Rodrigues, would be an odd fit for Cinema Novo. Featuring Rodrigues’s characteristic psychosexual obsessions embodied in Zulmira, a poor woman who fantasises about a lavish funeral to provoke envy in her neighbour, the play is also strikingly minimalist, comprising only a few objects such as chairs and tables. Yet Hirszman’s adaptation, co-written with Eduardo Coutinho, shows precisely what cinema can bring to the table. 

Tempering Rodrigues’ tragicomic style, The Deceased adopts a subdued, socially grounded tone, firmly anchored in real locations and the sordid textures of a lower-middle-class Rio neighbourhood. It also marks the cinematic debut of Fernanda Montenegro, Brazil’s greatest living actress. Although Montenegro already had an extensive career in theatre, radio and television by that point, from the opening credits sequence, where she walks towards the camera with her “big eyes” (as noted by different characters), you sense something truly special is happening in front of you.

Director: Helena Solberg

The ‘discovery’ of Helena Solberg within Cinema Novo, long regarded as an exclusively male affair, is relatively recent. Like fellow figures such as Diegues and Jabor, Solberg studied at PUC-Rio university and worked as a reporter for the student union that produced Five Times Favela. In a movement largely silent on questions of gender, her 20-minute short The Interview stands out. Assembling Nagra-recorded interviews with upper middle-class women aged 19 to 27, it layers their testimonies over staged images of a woman (the director’s sister-in-law) preparing for the beach, strolling through Ipanema and trying on a wedding dress. 

The film’s revelatory dimension is primarily aural: unseen, because they did not want to be filmed, the women speak candidly about career, marriage and social roles, their views often conservative. Then, unexpectedly, the film pivots, closing with photographs of religious ‘pro-family’ marches in 1964 as a radio narrator notes that the “new government” was backed by women’s organisations. In light of Brazil’s recent conservative turn and the resurgence of similar demonstrations, these images feel newly unsettling today.

Director: Glauber Rocha

When President Dilma Rousseff was ousted in 2016 in an orchestrated parliamentary coup, a scene from Glauber Rocha’s Entranced Earth went viral in Brazil: Paulo Autran, as Porfírio Diaz, grins dementedly at the camera while being crowned, an image that for many captured Vice-President Michel Temer’s calculating ascent. That Rocha’s film had become a meme is perhaps ironic, yet it confirms the film’s prophetic legacy in diagnosing a country where the thirst for power often eclipses the needs of the people. 

After the triumph of Black God, White Devil, and the blow of the 1964 military coup, you might expect Rocha to have reached a creative dead end. Yet, despite the lack of revolutionary optimism and its critique of both left and right, Entranced Earth is formally no less inventive than his previous film. Pushing allegory to new extremes, it surges with explosive energy, fusing frenetic handheld camerawork, percussive sounds, candomblé chants and declamatory voiceover into the trance-like cinematic experience promised by its title. Caetano Veloso, one of the founders of the Tropicalist movement, later said the movement owed its very existence to this groundbreaking and still urgent film.

Director: Joaquim Pedro de Andrade

Macunaíma’s opening sets its unhinged tone: a crying, full-grown Black man (Grande Otelo) is forcibly expelled from the body of his mother (a cross-dressed Paulo José), hitting the ground with a dull thud. Otelo had been one of faces of the musical chanchadas, maligned by Cinema Novo directors as escapist fare. With Macunaíma, the movement somehow made peace with the genre, and it worked: the film was its only box-office hit. 

It’s not difficult to see why. Powered by hilarious performances, Macunaíma is bonkers, pop and kitsch, its ever-shifting narrative wrapped up in garish colours. Adapted from Mário de Andrade’s 1929 modernist landmark, the film transposes the action to a rapidly industrialising 1960s Brazil by way of a Tropicalist, carnivalesque aesthetics of excess. Not everyone was amused. Die-hard Cinema Novo members feared the movement had strayed too far from its original goals. But in the shadow of the just-enacted AI-5 decree, which tightened persecution and censorship in the country, satire and allegory were no longer aesthetic choices but survival tactics.

Director: Nelson Pereira dos Santos

Inspired by 1920s Brazilian modernism, Tropicalism embraced the notion of cultural cannibalism: devouring foreign influences and recycling them into something distinctly Brazilian. In How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, this principle appears in both form and content. Punctuated by excerpts from letters, diaries and official documents recounting the colonial encounter in voiceover and title cards, the film counters these accounts with a narrative centred on the Tupinambá Indigenous people, with much of the dialogue spoken in Tupi and the actions frequently contradicting the historical records. 

Loosely based on Hans Staden’s account of captivity among the Tupinambá, the film transforms the German explorer into the Frenchman of the title but denies him any heroic escape: by the end, he is consumed according to tribal custom. A perfect companion to Macunaíma, the film shares its colourful aesthetic and irreverent humour. Yet its dismantling of Brazil’s official colonial mythology remains a unique contribution to Cinema Novo, one that resonates with renewed force today in light of contemporary decolonial debates.

Our Brazil on Film season runs at BFI Southbank from 1 May to 30 June 2026.