How to Die in Cinema

Milionário and José Rico are robbed of their money and their fans' enthusiasm. But a female truck driver is out to help them.

Half a century ago, Brazilian composer and musician Antonio Carlos "Tom" Jobim (1927-1994) introduced bossa nova to a worldwide audience with "The Girl from Ipanema." This relaxed, cool, sensuous music blended jazz and samba. After recording an album of songs by his friend Jobim, Frank Sinatra is reported to have said, "I haven't sung so quietly since I had laryngitis." Naturally, "The Girl from Ipanema" and Frank Sinatra are featured in this musical collage of countless seamlessly edited excerpts of concert footage that cover decades of events all over the world: from Rio de Janeiro to Lisbon, Paris, Copenhagen, Jerusalem, Tokyo, Montreal, New York and back to Rio.

After an extended period directing original screenplays, dos Santos returned to the creative engagement with literature that was the wellspring of his early masterpieces, offering a combinatory adaptation of five stories by the renowned Brazilian novelist João Guimarães Rosa. Openly embracing a mode of magical realism, dos Santos' celebrated film tells the story of a farming family defined by the absence of its father who abruptly abandoned his wife and children, sailing away down the river, including his son who continues to communicate with his father, speaking daily to him from the river bank. While offering an evocative vision of rural Brazil as a timeless land of mystery and solemnity, The Third Bank of the River is also bitingly satiric in the remarkable depiction of religious belief when the family moves to the city and its youngest member, a mesmerizing little girl, is revealed to be a kind of saint, capable of miraculous acts. -Harvard Film Archive

An aging Brazilian actor teams up with a film student on a trip to Mexico, in order to find out an unknown movie his mother allegedly watched before she committed suicide.

Documentary about the life of Tom Jobim, from the perspective of three women of his life: his sister, Helena Jobim, his first wife, Thereza, and his second wife, Ana.

Spanning 10 years and 10,000 miles, One Day We Arrived in Japan shows the stories of three Brazilian families who set off to Japan in search of a better future – a mother and daughter, a young couple, and a family of four with a small child. The film captures the passage of time, forming layers of memory and revealing how the families’ dreams and expectations stand up to a grueling new reality on the other side of the world. Since 1990, hundreds of thousands of Brazilians of Japanese descent have gone to Japan to work. This unique documentary brings to light the gripping personal stories behind a major transnational phenomenon.