Fernanda Montenegro Movies
Fernanda Montenegro has been a leading actress in theater and television in her native Brazil since the 1950s, though it wasn't until 1998 that she would win her greatest acclaim outside her homeland, with an award-winning performance in Central do Brasil (Central Station).Born Arlette Pinheiro Esteves da Silva, Fernanda Montenegro began her acting career in radio, appearing on Brazilian soap operas while still a teenager. She made her stage debut in 1950, when she appeared in a production of Aiegres Cancoes with actor Fernando Torres. Torres and Montenegro would later marry and have two children, both of whom would work in film and television, actress Fernanda Torres and director Claudio Torres. In the early '60s, Montenegro began working in television and by the end of the 1970s, she became one of Brazil's best-known actresses, appearing in many popular soap operas, detective programs, and drama specials. She continued to be active in the theater as well, winning the Moliere Prize in 1982, for her role in As Lagrimas Amargas de Petra von Kant, a stage adaptation of the film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
Montenegro's feature film work has been sporadic but well-regarded. After making her film debut in 1964, with A Falecida, she won the Best Actress award at the 1970 Moscow Film Festival for her performance in Em Familia. Her work in Tudo Bem earned her the Best Actress honors at 1977's Taormina Film Festival in Italy and, in 1998, she received the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival and a U.S. Academy Award nomination for her role in Central do Brasil. ~ All Movie Guide
Based on Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez's novel of the same name, director Mike Newell's Love in the Time of Cholera details a passionate love triangle that unfolds in turn-of-the-century South America. Oscar-winning Pianist scribe Ronald Harwood adapts the story of two young lovers who bide their time for years while anxiously awaiting the day they can finally be together. Through marriages, affairs, careers, and deaths, the couple never loses hope that destiny will unite them in the end. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Javier Bardem, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, (more)
Three generations of women struggle to make lives for themselves and their families in the desert wastes of Northern Brazil in a drama from filmmaker Andrucha Waddington. In 1910, Vasco de Sá (Ruy Guerra) leads his wife, Áurea (Fernanda Torres), and her mother, Dona Maria (Fernanda Montenegro), to their new home -- a ramshackle cabin in Maranhão, a tiny village in the middle of a barren sand dune. Vasco and Áurea's new neighbors are hardly welcoming of the new arrivals, especially Massu (Seu Jorge), and when Vasco unexpectedly dies, Áurea and Dona Maria are left to fend for themselves, an especially vexing challenge as Áurea is with child. Nine years later, Áurea and Dona Maria have turned their cottage into a home, but life in Maranhão remains a constant uphill battle, and Áurea dreams of moving away with her daughter, Maria (Camilla Facundes). Áurea becomes infatuated with Luiz (Enrique Diaz), who works with a group of astronomers who have come to Maranhão to observe an eclipse, but their romance comes to a crashing halt when Dona Maria is killed. By 1942, Maria (now played by Fernanda Torres) is a promiscuous alcoholic who brings shame to Áurea (now played by Fernanda Montenegro). After the body of an Air Force pilot is found near Maranhão, a military officer is sent to investigate -- Luiz (now played by Stenio Garcia). When Luiz meets Maria, he sees the image of the woman he longed for years before, and while she doesn't have the same feelings for him, Maria realizes that Luiz represents her best hope of finally escaping the village she's come to hate. The House of Sand received its North American premiere at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Regina (Fernanda Montenegro) is a retired divorcée living in Rio de Janeiro. She's estranged from her only son and his family because he's invited his father to live with him. She's devoted to her dog, Betina, and occupies her spare time as a member of the police force's special senior citizen program. Regina, operating under the code name "Snow White" spends a lot of her time looking for wrongdoers to report to the police. She spends her evenings looking out her apartment window with binoculars into the windows of her neighbors across the street. One night, she watches as an older gentleman appears to give his bedridden wife a lethal injection. She reports it to the police, but they back off when they learn that the gentleman, Carmago (Raul Cortez), is a respected member of the judiciary. Alcides (Luiz Carlos Persy), Regina's police contact, gets so much political flack that he kicks Regina out of the program. But Regina takes it upon herself to continue the investigation on her own. Carmago notices that he's been seeing her around a lot, and, thinking it's a coincidence, asks Regina out on a date. She accepts for the sake of her "investigation," but before long the two find that they are really hitting it off. The Other Side of the Street was co-written and directed by Marcos Bernstein, who co-wrote the script for Central Station, the film that earned Montenegro an Academy Award nomination. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Fernanda Montenegro, Raul Cortez, (more)
- 2001
This fanciful fantasy from Brazil (which was adapted from a play that previously inspired a top-rated Brazilian TV series) follows two poor but resourceful young men, Jack the Cricket (Matheus Nachtergaele) and Chico (Selton Mello), on their adventures. Looking for work, Jack and Chico get a job at a bakery, where the mean-spirited owner feeds them food so awful that when they give it to a dog, it kills the poor animal, leading the boys to fast-talk a priest into giving the dog a funeral mass. Later on down the road, shy Chico falls in love with beautiful Rosinha, whose father is the town's wealthiest citizen. While Chico is too timid to approach her, Jack is able to fool Rosinha's boyfriends into leaving town, leaving the field open for his friend. And finally, a gang of ruthless criminals invades the town and goes on a murder spree, with Jack gunned down alongside many of the town's most prominent citizens. As Chico buries his friend, Jack matches wits in the next world with the Devil (Luis Melo), persuading the Virgin Mary (Fernanda Montenegro) to put in a good word for himself and his friends to Jesus. O Auto Da Compadecida proved to be a box-office sensation in Brazil, where it has become the nation's top-grossing homegrown feature. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Matheus Nachtergaele, Selton Mello, (more)
Former documentary filmmaker Walter Salles (Foreign Land) directed this Brazilian-French road movie tracing the travels and travails of a young boy and an aging woman across the Brazilian landscape. In Rio de Janeiro's central railroad station, callous Dora (leading Brazilian stage/screen actress Fernanda Montenegro) works at a stand where she writes letters for a parade of poor and illiterate. Some of these remain undelivered because she chooses not to mail all of the letters. One of her customers is a woman whose nine-year-old son, Josue (Vinicius de Oliveira), hopes to see the father he has never met, but after the mother dictates two letters to the father, she's killed when hit by a bus. Since Josue is left homeless, Dora reluctantly takes him home to her small apartment overlooking the railroad tracks, where she sometimes spends time with her neighbor Irene (Marilia Pera). Dora places Josue with people who claim to find adoptive parents. When Irene informs her they actually sell children who are then killed for their organs, Dora rescues Josue, and the two board a bus. After a failed attempt to abandon Josue at a roadside stop, Dora and Josue hitch a ride from a religious truck driver. Failing to locate his father, they arrive penniless at a huge rural religious convocation, where Josue suggests Dora bring her letter-writing skills back into play. The notion works, and Dora profits by writing letters to saints for the more devout among the assembled multitudes. Continuing on, they arrive at a sprawling-mass housing development -- and hopefully, a solution to the problem of a family for Josue. Young actor de Oliveira was a shoeshine boy who beat out more than 1,500 other children who auditioned or were interviewed for the Josue role. Made with grants from the Sundance Institute, NHK, and the French Ministry of Culture, this film was shown at 1998 film festivals (Sundance, Berlin). ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Fernanda Montenegro, Marilia Pera, (more)
Bruno Barreto returned to his native Brazil after a ten-year absence to direct this fact-based political thriller that was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Pedro Cardoso stars as Rio de Janeiro journalist Fernando Gabeira, who decides with his friend Cesar (Selton Mello) to take up arms with a radical leftist organization, MR-8, in 1969. The revolutionaries, who include the tough-talking and beautiful Maria (Fernanda Torres), are fighting to overthrow Brazil's brutal military government through civil unrest and guerilla tactics. Their first action, the robbery of a bank, is successful, although one group member is captured and tortured by Henrique (Marco Ricca), a secret service agent plagued by his conscience. As a follow-up to the heist, the MR-8 members kidnap the U.S. ambassador to Brazil, Charles Burke Elbrick (Alan Arkin). During four days of captivity, however, the kidnappers discover that their prisoner is a good-hearted man of conscience, causing Fernando to become increasingly uneasy about the group's plan to kill Elbrick if a demand for the release of political prisoners goes unheeded. O Que E Isso, Companheiro? (1997) was based on Gabeira's book of the same name but was released in the U.S. under the title Four Days in September. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Alan Arkin
This is a sympathetic, observant drama about the trials and tribulations of Macabea (Marcelia Cartaxo) who has left her home in northeastern Brazil to seek her fortune in Sao Paulo. Macabea misses her friends and family but stays with her dreams for the future -- even in the face of unfair treatment from her fellow office workers, her boyfriend, and her roommates. She has many traits that would resonate in a wide range of viewers, and she easily carries this story based on a novel by Clarice Lispector. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Marcelia Cartaxo, José Dumont, (more)
- 1981
A large factory in Brazil is having problems with its workers and their union, just as the workers are having their problems with the factory bosses. In order to make their grievances heard, the workers decide to go out on strike against the plant. This action divides a family -- the son opts for working within the system and not joining the strikers, the father was the union organizer who got the strike together in the first place. His ideals are so strong that he had been jailed for them earlier. The strike is broken in the end, and the young man is vilified by his wife -- who leaves him, and by his father -- who disowns him, and by the other workers. As the father goes off to participate in a funeral of one of the strikers killed by the police, the son is left to ponder the consequences of his actions, and to reconsider whether he was completely justified in his stance. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Fernanda Montenegro, Gianfrancesco Guarnieri, (more)
The eccentric members of a wealthy Brazilian family each go through personal torment, debauchery and intense guilt in this symbolic and gory film. The father has made a fortune in the slaughterhouse business and ignores the feelings of his wife and his workers. He frequents a mulatto woman, who is always seen naked. His daughter and her friend act on their lesbian fantasies before her friend marries her brother. An elderly aunt seduces the brother before she drowns herself in the swimming pool. His lesbian sister shoots the girl, and the boy incestuously attacks his mother. When the mother threatens to leave, the father begs for her to stay and continue the hollow charade of their marriage for the sake of social appearances. The father grovels before his mistress after his daughter slashes her wrists. Any comparison between this dysfunctional family, the Manson family, and Shelley Winters' sick Barker brood in Bloody Mama is all an unfortunate artistic coincidence. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jose Lewgoy, Fernanda Montenegro, (more)
- 1965
Zulmira (Fernanda Montenegro) is a woman who visits the doctor when she decides she is dying. The doctor pronounces that she is in good health, but Zulmira sets aside a sizeable sum of money for her elaborate funeral. She catches cold and asks her husband (Ivan Candido) on her deathbed to take the money for the services. The roguish husband passes himself off as a cousin and gives her the cheapest available funeral. He goes to a soccer game where he gambles away the rest of the money and falls apart emotionally in this grim and satirical comedy drama. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Fernanda Montenegro
