Olga Danitch

In the 60's Lúcia McCartney is a call girl who is a fan of the Beatles. A diplomat tries to get her out of prostitution by falling in love with her.

Two women from Méier, a suburban neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, marry wealthy men who suddenly become millionaires. Displaced from their original social background and unsuited to wealth, the two wives must devise a plan to, acting like socialites, win over high society and win back their husbands.

An extended research tour of US university film programs introduced dos Santos to the American avant-garde filmmakers, among them Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage, who would directly inspire his formally radical adaptation of an allegorical short story about adultery and colonialism by Guilherme de Figueiredo. Filmed in both Manhattan and Brazil and set against the background of the Vietnam War and its protests, Hunger for Love uses a rigorously abstract soundtrack and narrative structure to evoke the acute paranoia of the period building up to the December 1968 military coup that tipped Brazil perilously close to a conservative dictatorship. With its harsh critique of the decadent tendencies of the Sixties counterculture, Hunger for Love offers a key expression of the self-consciously “ideological” phase of Cinema Novo. -Harvard Film Archive