Diário de Uma Busca

Resorting on a vast archive material of newsreels, photographs, letters, family videos, fiction movies, diary and popular songs excerpts, the documentary reassesses the legacy of the dictatorial period of Getúlio Vargas (1937-1945). Through the comparison and analysis of these heterogeneous records, produced for different purposes, from political propaganda to family celebration, the film explores the several layers of the political web of the Estado Novo, exposing its external inspirational sources, functionality and contradictions.

When Cunda, a man living deep in the Brazilian rainforest, is bitten by a snake, he has a hallucination of four chimpanzees. Once he recovers, he is shocked to find the four chimpanzees waiting for him at home, and, believing them to be special, decides to take them to the city in order to sell them.

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.

Dayse, a Brazilian playwright known as Cyclone, wants to study in Paris. Having a career in theater is unthinkable for a woman in São Paulo in 1918. But her director doesn’t want her to go, as he would lose his mistress and ghostwriter. When she becomes pregnant by him, her dream starts to fade. An artist’s struggle for self-determination in a patriarchal society, based on the true story of Daisy Pontes and modernist Oswald de Andrade.

Teenager Joana feeds her soul with literature and rock. In 1979, when amnesty is granted in Brazil, she's forced to move with her family from Paris back to the country she barely remembers. Back in the city she was born in, and where her father was forcedly disappeared, she recovers pieces of memory from a fragmented childhood in Rio de Janeiro. Not everything is real, not everything is imagination. And as she remembers, Joana must write her own story in the present tense.

Two moments in the life of Pedro. First in 1997, he lives with his family in Rio de Janeiro and works at Gás do Brasil, a company that is undergoing a tough restructuring process, with layoffs and early retirements. Soon, privatization will come. In the second moment, two years later, Pedro lives retired in his hometown Barbosa, in the company of his childhood memories, his dog and his girlfriend. By interweaving these two moments in time, we put ourselves in Pedro's skin and experience his fears and delights.

Eleven award winning directors explore why nearly one out of every two students in Latin America never graduates high school.