Jose Joffily Movies

An retired police precinct chief from Copacabana finds his fate taking an unsettling turn after becoming the main suspect in the death of his lover - a prominent Rio de Janeiro streetwalker - in director Jose Joffily's tense underworld thriller. Vieira used be a high profile law enforcer, but these days he spends most of his time in the company of lusty prostitute Magali. When Magali is murdered, the authorities quickly shift their suspicions to Vieira and crooked cop Montiero begins blackmailing the former precinct chief. Now, as Vieira faces crooked cops on one side and murderous thugs on the other, he finds a last chance at happiness in the form of the beautiful Flor. But on the streets of Rio love and death can go hand in hand, and the man who used to enforce the law will now find himself forced to take a violent stance against it. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

In 1980, impoverished working-class child actor Fernando Ramos da Silva became the darling of Brazilian cinema after starring in the internationally acclaimed Pixote, a wrenching look at the plight of Rio de Janeiro street urchins forced into criminal lives. With such an auspicious debut, a great career for Ramos da Silva seemed inevitable. Unfortunately, fate and the rigidity of Brazil's social stratus had other, more tragic plans. This biopic tells his sorrowful tale and follows the grim sequence of events that led to his brutal, controversial murder by the police.

Ramos da Silva was the seventh in a family of ten. His father died when he was still a child. He got his start acting in a play and was later selected from 1300 other boys to play the role of Pixote. For the role, he received world-wide attention and a small fortune. It was too much for Ramos de Silva and he began to identify too closely with Pixote, it created a schism within the confused boy that he never resolved. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

For many centuries, most of the good farming land in Brazil has been owned by a few fabulously wealthy families. The poor and peasants have been forced to make do with whatever little plots of land these families will allow them to till, or with the wages they get for farming for the great landowners. In 1985, 1500 poor Brazilians invaded a huge farm in Rio Grande do Sul and claimed it for their own, making a village there. While the government and landowners pressed for the occupation to end, the villagers used the power of publicity to press for land reform -- something often promised in every South American country and never yet delivered in any meaningful way. This documentary tells the story of that occupation. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

In a fictional story that exaggerates and condenses historical realities for the sake of dramatic impact, an isolated, quiet village of the Avaete people along the Amazon River is attacked by murderous psychos in the pay of a corrupt politician. Villagers are strafed from the air, bombed, and shot while trying to escape. To emphasize the gore, a woman is hung and quartered. The horrified cook of the marauders grabs a five-year-old Avaete boy, and they manage to escape into the jungle. The rest of the story is a series of coincidences that eventually bring a final confrontation between the grown-up boy -- who has vowed revenge for these killings -- and the politician behind the massacre. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

On the eve of the October, 1930 installation of Getulio Vargas as a dictator in Brazil, a leader of the opposition Liberal Alliance Party was murdered. This imaginative and well-wrought, fictional film is about the indirect involvement of Anayde Beiriz (Tania Alves) in that murder, but rather than focus on the political consequences, the film concentrates on the personality and character of the woman herself. Anayde was not bound by puritanical or religious restrictions in her relationships with men, and so her affair with the journalist Joao Dantes (Claudio Marzo) was sexually liberated for its time. Dantas had tight political connections with the military head of the Republican Party, making his own politics clear - what is less clear is the motivation for his subsequent actions. When the leader of the Liberal Alliance Party invades Dantas' apartment and makes public intimate letters and photographs of his relationship with Anayde, the journalist tracks down the man in a restaurant, and kills him. Since the dictator Vargas was supported by Dantas and considered a fascist by many, the underlying questions about Anayde are whether or not she could be considered "liberated," or was she simply a product of one time, one political outlook, and one place? ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

An exposé of the Brazilian blood-bank business, this hard-hitting documentary takes a rare look at the social strata that supplies most of the blood to the industry and details what happens from there. As director Sergio Rezende emphasizes through interviews, most of the donors are from the poorest classes who need the small amount of money they get for their blood in order to cover the basic cost of living. In other instances, the donors are drug addicts or alcoholics looking for a way to buy their next fix. In either case, the health of the donor is not called into question and as a result, hepatitis and other diseases have been passed on through transfusions. Making matters all the worse, 75 percent of blood donations go to multinational corporations who make gammaglobulin and albumine, all unaffordable to the lowest economic denominator in Brazil. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide