Karen Akerman

“There must be a different solution than the one from hell’. Full unadulterated terror (and music). 'The best class always ends with a lesson'. Almost baroque in its ambition and detail, Akerman and Seabra Lopes’ mesmerising short film delves deeply into the hard-wired dread of music lessons. Sewn around Schubert’s steely Opus 1, which is itself based on the no less terrifying legend of Goethe's Erlkönig, their film is a revelation.” International Film Festival Rotterdam.

A batch of 110 love letters exchanged by two lovers in the 1950s, discovered in Mato Grosso do Sul, is the starting point for this film.

In 2019, the leakage of messages exchanged by authorities in Brazil undermines the credibility of Operation Lava Jato. A group of journalists follows the unfolding of the case, in a sequence of crises that puts Brazilian democracy at risk.

Tom is a Brazilian immigrant in search of the American dream. Josh is a writer chasing his next story. When the two meet, Tom's dream seems to come true. But in their way stands a police officer.

When humans become animals and animals become humans.

The rise of MC Sabrina, a young Brazilian funk singer, from her beginnings in Morro dos Prazeres to the electrifying favela parties that pulse through the heart of Rio de Janeiro.

On a Saturday, unhappy with her marriage, Carol gets ready to leave, her husband usually goes to a soccer match and bring his friends back home for lunch. The dish of the day is feijoada. This film is an adaptation of the short story "Feijoada Completa" by Luis Fernando Verissimo, in turn inspired by the homonymous Chico Buarque' song.

Inspired by popular cult, O COVEIRO is part light part darkness, a bedtime story and almost a nightmare. A child is born and his parents die of fright just to see him. André Gil Mata revisits the traditional Portuguese tale, in a fantastic movie where heads bounce, but you hear a song.

Large boats navigate the Amazon River daily, transporting people, animals and goods. This film portrays one of these trips.

Junior, as he’s known, since he’s essentially still a child, seems to be having a tough time getting on in life. He shares cheap lodgings with another fellow and earns money doing strenuous night shifts at a warehouse. It’s no surprise that he lives for football and desperately hangs onto the dream of perhaps every Brazilian kid – to become a famous player. Although he trains hard with his amateur team, he’s not one of the best. He won’t admit to the mounting jealousy he feels as he watches his talented friend doing extremely well on the pitch. What’s more, his prospects don’t look so rosy now that his young girlfriend Carine is pregnant, and he also has to deal with her dominant mother poking her nose in...

On the triple frontier between Brazil, Colombia and Peru, the twin towns of Letícia and Tabatinga form an urban island surrounded by the Amazon rain-forest. Following the ordinary events and the constant come and go of people along the border, Terras portrays the presence and the influence of the frontier on the lives of its inhabitants.

In a lake surrounded by buildings, a man builds a boat.

The mythological story of the first woman on Earth, who came before Eve. She is created by God to be Adam’s wife. However, Lilith does not accept a position of inferiority in relation to man, she rebels and goes to the desert. Lilith reappears as Eve’s double, eats the forbidden fruit, takes revenge on Adam, on God, and becomes the first woman to rise up against the ruling patriarchal system.

Cleo, a 43-year-old astronomer who is pregnant and emotionally fragile, is surprised by a visit from Nalu, her half-sister of Indigenous descent. The encounter reveals dark secrets and stirs up fragmented memories in Cleo, leading the two of them down a path of mysterious investigations.

Greice, a Brazilian girl studying in Lisbon, gets involved with a mysterious guy and ends up getting accused of a strange incident that occurs at the students' welcoming party, which forces her to return to her hometown to renew her residence permit. Hidden in a hotel, while preventing her mother from discovering she’s back in the country and with the help of some friends, Greice tries to find a place of comfort in the world.

Love is a cold war. A couple discuss their relationship in a Berlin Park.

In the wake of a dream, João Vieira Torres sets off to find the children that his grandmother Aurora, a midwife, helped deliver. Through encounters with the living and the dead, he uncovers tragic destinies which reflect a structural history of violence against women. A curse dispelled by the means of cinema, resulting in a film of exceptionally rare beauty.

A portrait of the city of São Paulo through the life of four of its inhabitants: an economist and analyst of the financial market, a metallurgist who works at Volkswagen, a motorcycle courier and a railway worker. Each character calls attention to one aspect of the economy in a period of social tension: the three weeks before the start of the World Cup. Observing the daily life of the characters, Future June aims to reflect on this historical moment and on the ways that the current economic model determines social and human relations.

Sergio travels to Guinea-Bissau to work for an NGO as an environmental engineer on a road project between the desert and the forest. There, he becomes entangled in an intimate yet unbalanced relationship with two inhabitants of the city, Diara and Gui. As neo-colonial dynamics among the expatriate community unravel, this fragile bond becomes his only refuge from an impending collapse into solitude or barbarism.

After his father's death, Gabriel leaves for Armação Beach in search of his origins. What he ends up finding is a complex plot around the mysterious figure of his grandfather, a whale skeleton and a city that wants to bury the past at any cost.

Love turns to hate and panic breeds suspicion as two parents deal with the kidnapping of their child.

Birth, life and death of a carnival sculpture. Linked to the mythology of the Orixás, a metaphor of creation based on the Babalotim doll, a boy idol who has lived through many carnivals.

Beside the savage desire to realize the enormities which he brooded on, nothing was sacred.

When a child is forced to become the house's adult because her father is sick and her mother is dead, there's an inversion in the natural order of things. Childhood becomes a saga. And the frustrated parenthood turns into a conviction.

Raul Seixas abandoned his career as a music producer to become a singer, mixing rock with baião. He adopted a radical style and fell into addiction, but became a Brazilian rock icon.