The adventures of Pedro, a musician who is trying his luck in Rio de Janeiro, in the 1950's. He leaves his hometown Belo Horizonte to share a lodging with his brother Carlos in Rio. During one of his gigs, he meets Arlete, a singer in a vocal group and fall in love.

A few weeks before Carnival, slum boys organize huntings for stray cats, whose leather can be used in Samba percussion instruments, like the Tamborim, a small drum.

Sérgio Mallandro is chosen by an alien to be the one to receive special powers to do good. But before that he must prove his worth and kind heart by rescuing a girl's pet. Along the way, he is frequently hampered by an envious villain.

In an overcrowded prision cell, each man has to make his own way and secure himself from the constant threat of sexual violence coming from the rest of the inmates.

Rio de Janeiro crooks rove about, performing petty tricks to survive, and get involved with a woman who steals cars.

Galanga, king of Congo brought to Brazil as a slave, finds gold in Vila Rica, in the State of Minas Gerais, and buys his enfranchisement, the properties of his former owner, and his companions' freedom, becoming Chico Rei, the first black man to own lands in Brazil.

Filmed over a five-year period, Chronically Unfeasible dissects Brazilian problems, using six people who meet in a restaurant in São Paulo as models to illustrate political, sociological and economic disparities between Brazil's upper and lower classes.

An accident at a construction site, resulting in one death, sets one worker off on a struggle for justice that exposes the mechanisms of exploitation and the class relations of a country that had undergone one decade of fast-paced ‘conservative modernisation’ at the hands of the military. As a sort of sequel to the classic The Guns (1964), following the fate of those characters as they move from enforcers of exploitation to exploited, it offers more than a snapshot of the period: the correspondent time lapses in fiction and reality capture the passage of a chunk of Brazilian history between the two films, and, therefore, also the transformations in cinematographic approaches to the social and political between the two moments. Equally daring in content and form, and in the originality of the adequacy of one to the other, it won the Silver Bear at Berlin.

The legend of Tristan and Isolde is one of the most beautiful love epics ever conceived. Richard Wagner, in a famous opera, had already tarnished its purity. The modern transposition of the legend is set in Brazil, in a village of poor fishermen on Guanabara Bay, framed by mountains not far from Rio de Janeiro. Two young cousins, Marcos and Jeronimo, get together to fish successfully - the arrastao is a large fishing net - and to resist the ugly local landowner, who sets the rules and the prices. This owner has a niece: Emaïsa, who loves Marcos and is loved by him.

Young robber, son of a prostitute who had killed herself, gets involved with two police informers, who force him to share the loot he gets.