13 Brazilian Films Feature in Berlin’s Main Sections

By John Hopewell

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Competition

“All the Dead Ones”

Caetano Godardo, Marco Dutra
Following up on their Locarno-prized “Good Manners,” genre auteur Dutra and Gotardo deliver a lushly turned-out family drama that converts ghostliness into political metaphor, conflating 1899 Sao Paulo with its high-rise present, asking if the uneasy relationship between Brazil’s white elite and black majority has essentially changed.
Sales: Indie Sales

Encounters

“Los Conductos”

Camilo Restrepo
Pinky, on the run from a sect, takes to squatting, making T-shirts for a living, taking drugs and spinning images of the Apocalypse, damnation, revenge. A spectral, crazed allegory of Colombian post-civil conflict reinsertion that won Mar del Plata’s 2019 Works in Progress.
Sales: Best Friend Forever

Panorama

“A Common Crime”

Francisco Márquez
Set in class-riven Argentina and packing, reportedly, a great finale and commanding performance from lead Elisa Carricajo as an Argentine university teacher who fails to help her maid’s son, with literally haunting consequences.
Sales: Cercamon

“Dry Wind”

Daniel Nolasco
A seemingly straight-arrow, stylish and candid LGBTQ erotic drama set in ’s sticks discovers hidden depths and finally a good-humored humanism as a stolid, bottled-up loner develops a sexual obsession for a statuesque factory co-worker. “Brazilian queer cinema has a sense of urgency, which ‘Dry Wind’ captures,” says Panorama head Michael Stütz.
Sales: The Open Reel

“Shine Your Eyes”

Matías Mariani
“A big surprise,” says Carlos Chatrian, artistic director of the Berlin Film Festival, a dreamlike psychological thriller, tracking Amidi searching for older brother Ikenna in Sao Paulo’s African community in a world of fluid identity, nostalgia for ancestral culture, labyrinthine architecture and moments of happiness.
Sales: MPM Premium

Panorama Dokumente

“Amazon Mirror”

Federico Segtowick
A documentary that peels away layers of corruption, media manipulation, ecological and human disaster behind the construction of the Amazon’s Tupurí hydroelectric plant under military dictatorship. “Urgent, very contemporary and beautifully shot in black-and-white with very high contrast,” says Stütz.
Sales: ELO Co.

“Nardjes A.”

Karim Aïnouz
The latest from Aïnouz, following 2019 Cannes Critics’ Week winner “Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmão,” this is a documentary shot on the fly capturing the empowerment, exhilaration and illusions of Algeria’s Revolution of Smiles.
Sales: MPM Premium

Forum

“Divinely Evil”

Gustavo Vinagre
From a lavish, salmon-colored sitting room adorned with Victorian furniture and leather-clad mannequins, Wilma Azevedo, 74, Brazil’s “queen of sadomasochistic literature” tells her vibrant, sprawling life story.

“Light in the Tropics”

Paula Gaitán
“Brazilian films exceed traditional notions of self-reflective auteurs, talking from personal viewpoints about big questions for society,” says Chatrian. One case in point, and “totally unexpected,” he adds, is “Light in the Tropics,” merging ethnographic documentary and fiction to rediscover Brazil’s indigenous communities in a 255-minute triptych feature.

“Window Boy Wants to Have a Submarine”

Alex Piperno
A singular title for a singular film from Uruguay’s Piperno, a low-fi sci-fi relationship drama with social and ecological overtones as a deckhand on a Patagonia cruise ship discovers a portal to a lonely young woman’s apartment in Montevideo.
Sales: Square Eyes

Generation 14plus

“Alice Junior”

Gil Baroni
Chatrian calls it a breath of fresh air. The world of a transgender teenage YouTuber is flipped upside down when she moves to a conservative rural town with her always-supportive single father.
Sales: Moro Filmes

“My Name Is Baghdad”

Caru Alves de Souza
Seventeen-year-old female skater Baghdad lives in a São Paulo working-class neighborhood, skates with male friends until she happens upon a group of female skaters who change everything.
Sales: Reel Suspects

“Sisters in the End of the World”

Vinícius Lopes, Luciana Mazeto
Their mother is dying, father’s never cared, but Ana and Ju find solidarity in one other, even as the world around them collapses.