10 great films set in São Paolo

São Paulo is Brazil’s biggest city. Indeed, with around 22 million inhabitants, its metropolitan area is, along with Mexico City, the largest one in Latin America. When it comes to Brazilian movies, it may come a distant second to the much more picturesque Rio de Janeiro, where most of the film industry has historically been settled, but it remains one of Brazilian film’s great subjects and recurring images – a place whose contradictions and large wealth gap stand for the country’s own.

Outsiders often say that São Paulo is defined by bad and never-ending transit, rainy weather, ugly buildings and very few green areas or welcoming tourist spots. Even the biggest river, the Tietê, famously stinks. Almost nobody outside São Paulo likes it. Local filmmakers would disagree with that image, but they know how to play into it, if only as an always useful metaphor. There aren’t a lot of upbeat feelings when it comes to São Paulo movies. A bleak worldview seems to come naturally to them. The city entrapping those who live there is a recurring motif. Characters often feel like they suffer São Paulo as much as they live there.

As a large cosmopolitan city, São Paulo has also given artists a huge populace from whose dramas they can draw inspiration. There is a liveness to the city that ultimately comes through. It’s a great place for stories and all sorts of intersections, if one where optimism must be very hard earned.

Director: Luiz Sérgio Person

When Brazil started its push towards heavy industrialisation in the 1950s, São Paulo was at the centre of it. Luiz Sérgio Person’s film was an attempt to deal with that head on. The plot sees an unsatisfied man, who is always hoping for more, going to work as a middle-manager for the new automobile industry, but his material gains never amount to anything. 

Everything in São Paulo often comes back to cars. It’s a land of mirages, where every opportunity signifies nothing. The Brazilian middle-class does not go to heaven. Person’s movie is far from the first made in town, but it feels like it invented São Paulo cinema. Most of the visual vocabulary of the city seems to come from it. His style has a foot in Michelangelo Antonioni’s angst, and another in Satyajit Ray’s stories of deluded urban professionals. São Paulo, Incorporated is a movie of harsh realism with some fine black-and-white cinematography and cityscapes. It proposes an eternal urban archive of damning, unforgiven images.

Director: Ozualdo Ribeiro Candeias

Ozualdo Candeias was a truck driver who loved movies and decided to make his own. He did so in a very idiosyncratic style that didn’t care to conform to anyone’s idea of cinema. His first feature, The Margin, often suggests a São Paulo rereading of Mario Peixoto’s great avant-garde classic Limite (1931). It’s a sort of love story set among a group of desperate and abandoned characters. 

The movie takes place around the banks of the Tietê river, which stands as a promise and a limit for everyone’s lives. While Peixoto was in dialogue with the European modern art he knew well, Candeias draws heavily from the poverty around him. The movie has barely any dialogue, and the filmmaker finds a lot of beauty in the middle of the harshness. Brazil’s underdevelopment would remain Candeias’s great source of inspiration, and from The Margin onwards, no other filmmaker did more to give it representation.

Director: Walter Hugo Khouri

No filmmaker is more associated with São Paulo than Walter Hugo Khouri, whose work stands at the opposite end to Candeias’s. The great Cinema Novo director Glauber Rocha famously loathed him and regarded his ‘Europeanised’ work as decadent bourgeois drama, and for a long time Khouri’s reputation suffered under it. His most famous movie is Men and Women (1964), but it’s possible to prefer The Palace of Angels, which was in the 1970 Cannes competition. 

Three women tired of exploitation set out to start their own high-class bordello, but owning the means of production doesn’t add up to much when you are the product. This materialistic nightmare is observed with clinical care by Khouri. His form is impeccable, and he does wonders with the décor. The main apartment, the so-called palace of angels, is one of the great Brazilian film sets, a true tomb for the character’s self-delusions and proof that Khouri’s work was more political than he was given credit for.

Director: Jairo Ferreira

“This film is dedicated to the terrorists of form, and not those of content.” So starts Jairo Ferreira’s hour-long diary in which he catalogues anything that crosses his mind in a funny and talky, if very bitter manner as he goes through a feverish São Paulo. Ferreira was a big believer in Orson Welles’s claim that 8mm was ideal for a filmmaker’s notebook. He was a film critic who was known foremost as the major chronicler of São Paulo’s underground film scene, and cinephilia does play a large role in his movie, with favourites like Samuel Fuller’s Underworld U.S.A. (1961) often invoked. 

The Vampire of the Cinematheque offers lots of evocative night footage of the city. At one point, Ferreira films a man masturbating as a homage to the audience for the local sex comedies; at another, he starts to fight Kodak about the low quality of their print’s sound. Did a critic-turned-filmmaker ever come up with a better title?

Director: Leon Hirszman

Most of São Paulo’s industry is based in three suburban towns popularly known together as ABC. They became a major part of the Brazilian imagination about the working class, even more so after a series of strikes between 1978 and 1980 which, among other things, propelled the career of their leader, future president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Cinema Novo great Leon Hirszman documented the strikes and was energised by them. Deciding to make a movie about the people he met, he modernised a left-leaning late-1950s play about the struggle between a union organiser and his careerist son after a strike break. It is a didactic text, but Hirszman makes a miracle of well-observed humanist cinema. 

One of the defining portraits of Brazil’s working-class life, it’s helped by a wonderful cast led by original author Gianfrancesco Guarnieri, and Fernanda Montenegro. In updating the text, Hirszman also made a fine document of the impact of neoliberal promises among workers.

Directors: Jose Antonio Garcia and Ícaro Martins

Women’s football was illegal in Brazil between 1941 and 1979. According to law, it was deemed incompatible with the “nature” and reproductive health of women. After the ban suspension, the young filmmaking duo Jose Antonio Garcia and Ícaro Martins decided to make a sex comedy about a women’s football team. New Wave is a movie set against the old law in that it regards women playing football as a great source for subversion. 

An anarchic anything-goes spirit takes over New Wave, a proudly bisexual movie, near plotless and focused on showing its cast having a good time together. Bright colours, Godard and Fassbinder references, some cross-dressing (including by well-known male players), tons of sex, a very casual abortion subplot that got the movie in trouble with censors, lots of cameos by people like singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso – it’s a movie about freedom made freely. It is also by far the most joyful movie included here.

Director: Suzana Amaral

When Suzana Amaral set out to adapt Clarice Lispector’s popular novel, she made two key changes, ditching the metatextual elements and shifting the action to her city. São Paulo makes a lot of sense as the setting of this tale of a very unexceptional young woman who gets to the big city and ends up devoured by it, and the filmmaker obviously knows it well. Amaral understands that a lot of the power of Hour of the Star comes from the main character, Macabéa, and she found a 21-year-old newcomer, Marcélia Cartaxo, who gave one of Brazilian cinema’s most memorable performances, winning the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

Amaral’s film belongs to a series of naturalist and often cruel movies about São Paulo youth that came after the success of Hector Babenco’s Pixote (1980), but Amaral’s careful eye and Cartaxo’s powerful performances make it the richest of them.

Director: Paulo Sacramento

One of the darkest pages of recent São Paulo history happened in 1992 when 111 inmates of Brazil’s largest prison, Carandiru, were murdered by the police after a riot. A decade later, Paulo Sacramento taught a workshop to Carandiru’s inmates and then gave them cameras so they could film their daily routine. The Prisoner of the Iron Bars is informed by the place’s violent history and the complexities involved in the carceral industry. Sacramento strives towards giving men who society would rather not think about a voice, and his editing works hard to preserve their subjective experiences. 

An observational documentary with unusual levels of access due to the inmates’ own work, it is the rare movie one can say offers new images. It is also an act of preservation, as it documents the realities of the men’s incarceration and the stark facts of a prison that the state was now closing in an attempt to wash away the past.

Director: Juliana Rojas

Necropolis Symphony is set almost entirely inside a cemetery, but few movies from the last couple of decades have managed to suggest the city so well. A cruel and very funny movie about how urban renewal works, it is a horror musical about a gravedigger who gets recruited to help identify unmarked graves. The city needs to use its space better, so even the forgotten dead need to be better monetised. 

Director Juliana Rojas is one of the more refreshing voices in current Brazilian film. She often works with Marco Dutra in a horror register (see, for example, 2017’s Good Manners), but Necropolis Symphony, which she did alone and is lighter in tone despite the fantasy elements, may be her finest. Her major achievement is how, in the middle of the very good musical numbers and jokes, she keeps the movie full of trembling apprehension. Like a lot of horror movies, it suggests that playing with the dead has a price.

Directors: Priscyla Bettim and Renato Coelho

A group of marginalised characters – a Nigerian immigrant, two trans women and a young middle-class woman on the run from her boyfriend – meet at a downtown bar. Eventually a crime plot gets suggested, but The City of Abysses is foremost a stab at capturing the city during the Bolsonaro years while also looking back over a long history of São Paulo images. Despite the title, it is never a movie after a totality, as much as a series of individual experiences. It is full of references to local experimental cinema, but it’s also concerned with all the images that nobody has gotten around to filming. 

Priscyla Bettim and Renato Coelho’s approach is confrontational but playful. Their 16mm cinematography makes the city vital, and while the movie isn’t worried about narrative, it’s packed with events. The city is a large playground for emotions – cruel but surprisingly tender. There is still life in São Paulo, despite everything else.

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