The best Nelson Xavier’s movies

Set in Brazil, three kids who make a discovery in a garbage dump soon find themselves running from the cops and trying to right a terrible wrong.

A biography of spiritual medium and author Francisco Candido Xavier.

Little known actor, Jack Noah, is working on location in the dictatorship of Parador at the time the dictator dies. The dictator's right hand man, Roberto, makes Jack an offer he cannot refuse.. to play the dictator. Jack's acting skills fool the masses but not close friends and employees of the dictator.

In a small city of Brazil, Flor, a cooking teacher, marries Vadinho, a very handsome and erotic man. Once married she finds he is a good-for-nothing who takes all her money to gamble. After his death, Flor misses the goods of the marriage so she marries again with a very correct gentleman - the owner of a drugstore. Now she's very happy with her man, but misses the erotic moments with her previous husband. One day, Vadinho comes back as a ghost to quench her desires.

In 1925, Gabriela, a poor, uneducated, yet charming woman becomes cook, mistress, and then wife of Nacib, a bar owner in Ilhéus, a small Brazilian coastal town run by the local colonels.

Jessica, Sabrina and Daiane have dreams, just like all young people of any social class or place in the world. They live in a low-income neighborhood in the periphery of Rio de Janeiro and find in prostitution a way to survive and satisfy their consumer desires. However, even faced with the trials of absolute uncertainty and lack of hope, Jessica, Sabrina and Daiane insist on loving, having fun and planning their future.

Martin and Hazel Quarrier are small-town fundamentalist missionaries sent to the jungles of South America to convert the Indians. Their remote mission was previously run by the Catholics, before the natives murdered them all. They are sent by the pompous Leslie Huben, who runs the missionary effort in the area but who seems more concerned about competing with his Catholic 'rivals' than in the Indians themselves. Hazel is terrified of the Indians while Martin is fascinated. Soon American pilot Lewis Moon joins the Indian tribe but is attracted by Leslie's young wife, Andy. Can the interaction of these characters and cultures, and the advancing bulldozers of civilization, avoid disaster?

A photo-journalist goes to Brazil to investigate a savage crime boss. She becomes infatuated with the story.

Otavio is an idealistic union leader trying to organize workers at a factory to resist the company's exploitative practices. His son, Tião, one of the employees, is more of a realist and doesn't want to risk losing his job by striking. This clash of perspectives puts the father and son at odds. Fortunately, Tião's mother, Romana, is on hand to act as a moderator between the two opinionated men.

A small poor community called Javé is under threat of being flooded by a new dam that is being built, and the only way to prevent this is to prove the town's historical value. As most of the inhabitants are illiterate, they have no choice but to ask for the help of Antônio Biá, a man who has been ostracized ever since it was discovered that he had sent out letters with lies about their reputations as a way to keep his job in Javé's seldom-used post office. He now has the task of documenting people's memories of how the city was founded, yet each inhabitant has his or her own version of what happened.

A group of armed soldiers is sent to the Northeast of Brazil in an attempt to stop a famine-struck population from invading and stealing a food deposit in the dry backlands. While the alienation and insanity of people driven to hallucination by their latent hunger is conducted by the predictions of a religious figure, a truck driver observes the situation and remains torn between his friendship with the soldiers and his revolt against the lack of government action in fighting the misery that lingers over the region.

Having come out recently from jail, a tramp, willing to make quick money, decides to organize a pool match between two famous retired players.

Severino do Quixadá (Renato Aragão), a humble northeastern shepherd of goats, rescues Captain Virgulano or simply Captain (Nelson Xavier) and his band of cangaceiros of an ambush armed by the lieutenant Zé Bezerra (Jose Dumont), its eternal persecutor. Captain escapes taking with him the mysterious box that he removed from the interior of the assaulted train in the city of Cajarana. Seeking to escape the shooting, Severino ends up finding himself in the cangaceiros' camp, along with the mishap friends Mussum and Zacarias who, taking advantage of the confusion, fled the chain.

Adaptation of the series shown in 1988. The humble farmer Zé do Burro makes a promise to Santa Bárbara to save his donkey Nicolau from death. The payment is to carry a heavy cross from the interior of Bahia to a church in Salvador. When you reach the steps of the church, with injured shoulders, you have to deal with the incomprehension of a conservative priest. Author: Dias Gomes.

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.