Perfeito Fortuna

Maiquél has lost a bet and dyed his hair blond. This seemingly innocuous event triggers a head-on collision with destiny in which he goes from nobody to hero to outlaw — all in 24 hours.

After being released from prison, Dr. Nise da Silveira is back at work in a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro where she refuses to employ the new and violent electroshock in the treatment of schizophrenics. Ridiculed by doctors, she is forced to take on the abandoned Sector for Occupational Therapy, where she would start a revolution through paintings, animals and love.

Severino finds a magic medallion and becomes bewitched. To save their friend and prevent the forces of evil from dominating him forever, Sol, Bento, Pippo and Berenice embark on an icy adventure in the snow and go to the End of the World!

The film tells a little of the history of Brazil immersed in the caricature of the conditions of making cinema in this country. Flora and Carlos Manoel fall in love. She, from a family linked to the Monarchy, and he, a republican activist, live their love in the last days of the monarchy, without knowing that the end of the empire would also mean the end of their romance.

An accident at a construction site, resulting in one death, sets one worker off on a struggle for justice that exposes the mechanisms of exploitation and the class relations of a country that had undergone one decade of fast-paced ‘conservative modernisation’ at the hands of the military. As a sort of sequel to the classic The Guns (1964), following the fate of those characters as they move from enforcers of exploitation to exploited, it offers more than a snapshot of the period: the correspondent time lapses in fiction and reality capture the passage of a chunk of Brazilian history between the two films, and, therefore, also the transformations in cinematographic approaches to the social and political between the two moments. Equally daring in content and form, and in the originality of the adequacy of one to the other, it won the Silver Bear at Berlin.