Lineu Dias Movies

Lais Bodanzky makes her directorial debut with this harrowing expose of an archaic Brazilian mental hospital, based on a memoir by noted activist Austregesilo Carrano. The film revolves around Neto (Rodrigo Santoro), an average Brazilian teenager who likes to skateboard, rock-and-roll, drink beer, and smoke the odd joint. His youthful waywardness infuriates his severe, demanding father (Othon Bastos), who longs for his son to be a success. One day, Neto hits the road with his buddy Lobo, but when Lobo cheats him, he finds himself out of cash. Forced to beg strangers for bus fare, Neto is seduced by a beautiful older woman. When he returns a couple days later, his father is apoplectic. When, days later, he gets picked up by the cops for vandalism and for possessing a joint, his father completely wigs out and has him institutionalized. The mental hospital is something out of the dark days of the Soviet Union -- patients are drugged, catatonic, and often bound to their beds. Neto tries to explain his situation, but the hospital refuses to release him. They have to keep their numbers up to meet the patient quota. If Neto was sane before his stay, he was left unhinged and emotional fragile upon his release. Soon his depression and his mood swings land him back in an asylum where, out of desperation, he does something violent. This film was screened at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi

Casanova was only a warm-up act for 18th-century bisexual Portuguese poet Manuel Maria du Bocage (Victor Wagner), the "sworn enemy of hypocrites and priests." On a quest for the purity of love as he travels widely, crossing continents with companion Josino (Francisco Farinelli), Bocage declares, "I cannot refuse anything that wants to be loved." Bocage's allegorical epigrams, odes, and satires are expressed, while he encounters phantasmagorical creations (angels, Aphrodite, a merman, a sorcerer-gorilla), teases Trappist monks with obscene parables, joins Josino in jousting at windmills, and preaches sexual liberation under his banner of "Bacchus Triumphs." Reverberating with the avant-garde music of Livio Tragtenberg, the film is divided into chapters, such as "The Absurdity of Jealousy" and "Living Legend of a Dying Century." With cast, crew, sets, and costumes recycled from director Djalma Limongi Batista's earlier Caligula stage production, the film was shot in the mountains of Brazil and along tributaries of the Amazon. Shown at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. ~ Bhob Stewart, Rovi

The Brazilian Pixote so closely resembles the films of Luis Buñuel that one is almost shocked to see writer/director Hector Babenco's name on the credits. This is hardly the only shock in this near-hallucinatory cinematic experience. The title character, played by Fernando Ramos da Silva, has been abandoned by his parents and is scrounging for a living on the streets. Pixote survives by becoming a drug-dealer, pimp and murderer...and he's only ten years old. One of the first films to address the plight of Rio de Janeiro's street kids, Pixote combines stark realism with symbolic imagery. The film is based on José Louzeiro's novel Infancia dos Martos. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi