Remembering Nelson Pereira dos Santos

March 15–May 8, 2019

A tribute to a founding member of Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement, whose fiery but loving dissections of postcolonial society helped put the Global South on the cinematic map.

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Tent of Miracles
Rio, 100 Degrees
Barren Lives
Hunger for Love: Have You Ever Sunbathed Completely Nude?

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Past Films

Music According to Tom Jobim
- Friday, March 22 4 PM
- Wednesday, May 8 7 PM
Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Dora Jobim
Brazil, 2011
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

Dos Santos and codirector Dora Jobim (Antonio’s granddaughter) offer a catchy musical memorial to the master of bossa nova with this blend of archival performances (featuring Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Sinatra, et al.) and more contemporary interpretations.
Memories of Prison
- Friday, May 3 7 PM
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Brazil, 1984
A writer’s time among both political prisoners and “ordinary” criminals is chronicled in dos Santos’s examination of life under the Vargas dictatorship of the thirties, based on the memoirs of writer Graciliano Ramos (Barren Lives).
Tent of Miracles
- Friday, April 26 7 PM
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Brazil, 1977
Citizen Kane doused with caipirinha and given a carnival spin, dos Santos’s delightfully ribald tribute to the many cultures and races of Bahian society adapts the novel by famed author Jorge Amado.

Introduction by Richard Peña
A Very Crazy Asylum
- Saturday, April 6 8 PM
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Brazil, 1970
Echoing Brazil’s ever-elastic political blacklist, dos Santos’s clever subversion of a classic novel by Machado de Assis centers on a small town where authorities’ expanding definition of insanity makes everyone a candidate for the loony bin.
Hunger for Love: Have You Ever Sunbathed Completely Nude?
- Sunday, March 31 7 PM
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Brazil, 1968
Dos Santos’s formally radical adaptation of an allegorical short story about adultery and colonialism was inspired by his encounters with American avant-garde filmmakers like Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage.
Rio, Zona Norte
- Wednesday, March 27 7 PM
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Brazil, 1957
Race, class, and samba collide in dos Santos’s radicalization of Brazil’s widespread chanchada musical genre. Charismatic singer/cabaret artist Grande Otelo stars as a working-class composer trying to succeed in a rich (and white) man’s world.
Rio, 100 Degrees
- Sunday, March 17 7 PM
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Brazil, 1956
Five youth from the wrong side of the tracks hit Rio’s tourist zones in dos Santos’s first film, which adds a tropical beat and heat to Italian neorealism. Banned at the time, it’s now a startling time capsule of fifties samba and street style.
Barren Lives
- Friday, March 15 7 PM
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Brazil, 1963
A migrant family shifts from one unforgivingly barren land to another—and contends with similarly unforgiving landlords—in arguably the first masterpiece of Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement.

Introduction by Nathaniel Wolfson

Remembering Nelson Pereira dos Santos

March 15–May 8, 2019

One of the founding lights of Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement, Nelson Pereira dos Santos helped put the films of the Global South on the cinematic map. Debuting at the age of twenty-seven with Rio, 100 Degrees (1956), which threw a samba beat and some favela heat on an Italian neorealist aesthetic, dos Santos announced a new era in Brazilian cinema. Later works veered from the sunburnt austerity of Barren Lives to the bacchanalian, New York underground–inspired Hunger for Love, and the garishly colorful, sensually overloaded Tent of Miracles. Yet these disparate films were connected by dos Santos’s razor-sharp inquiries into the Third World’s postcolonial legacy and political divides, and by his fiery but loving dissection of Brazilian society in all its flaws and glories. Self-reflective, at once vibrantly populist and pointedly intellectual, his films dared not only to attack his country’s racial...

Dos Santos passed away last April at age eighty-nine, leaving behind a film career that covered more than half a century. We present a sampling of his work in newly remastered copies, from his debut with Rio, 100 Degrees to his last film, Music According to Tom Jobim, on the great Brazilian musician Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Jason Sanders, Film Notes Writer

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Series organized by Richard Peña and Film Curator Kathy Geritz. We wish to express our gratitude to Ivelise Pereira dos Santos, Marcia Pereira dos Santos, Marcelo Pedrazzi, Richard Peña, the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Jacob Perlin, Metrograph, for their generous assistance in making this tribute possible. Peña’s visit is made possible with support from the The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.