Nelson Xavier

"Portraits and excerpts from Brazilian films from all times. Actors, directors and images that affirm cinema."

A biography of spiritual medium and author Francisco Candido Xavier.

After the death of her handsome but good-for-nothing husband Vadinho, Flor, a widow, marries Dr. Teodoro, a respectable gentleman. Hilarity ensues when Vadinho's spirit returns into her life.

Underappreciated actor Jack Noah is on location in Parador at the time the dictator dies. The dictator's right-hand man 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.

Discovering your wife is sleeping with your boss can make a man do strange things. For a Samba-obsessed London clerk, robbing a bank and boarding the first flight to Rio are just the beginning.

Após perder a esposa e a caminho do suicídio, um homem se depara com O Livro dos Espíritos e começa uma jornada de transformação interior rumo aos mistérios da vida espiritual e suas influências no mundo material.

Three mothers see their reality become completely, they are: Ruth, whose teenage son, Raul, faces problems with drugs; Elisa, trying to make up for the absence of her husband giving full attention to the child, the little Theo, and Lara, teacher who faces the dilemma of an unplanned pregnancy. These three women, living in different times of their lives, seeking comfort next to Chico Xavier. And Karl reporter remains insisting on interviewing the medium, even without being prepared for it.

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

In the 1930s, in the South of State of Bahia, Brazil, an adventurer with no name or history, who has already been shot seven times, gets involved in the battle for land and cacao plantations. His plan is to take the place of "Colonel" Santana, taking his wife and money. He starts a bloody conflict, in which many simple people and landowners die.

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.

Two friends get rich running an illegal gambling business. But soon they start to compete, and become rivals.

Unhappy in her marriage, Rachel decides to separate from her husband, the businessman Virgílio. Determined to turn her life around, she moves from Petrópolis to the southern zone of Rio de Janeiro with her daughter, Clara, and goes to live in her mother Laura's house in Ipanema. There she falls in love with the charming, but gruff, Heitor, owner of a mechanic shop. He lives with his sister, Irene, in an old townhouse, one of the main settings of the telenovela.

Jose Inocencio had innocence only as part of his name, but only those who new him well could notice this. But nobody knew him. He was a storyteller, and he was always the main character in the stories he told. He managed not only to create stories about himself, he managed to create a legend. The story of this powerful cacao farmer; Maria Santa, the beloved wife who died; and their four children is the main theme of 'Renascer'.

Flora and Donatella were two friends bonded by their love of music, but whose passion for the same man separated them forever. Donatella was Marcelo’s wife; Flora, his lover and murderer — a crime which cost her freedom and the custody of her daughter Lara, born out of that relationship and raised by Donatella. Now, history repeats itself, only this time their quarrel is not only over the same man but for Lara’s love. Torn between two mothers, the girl doesn’t know that Flora’s dirty, scheming ambition is not to draw her closer, but to keep her away from her longtime rival – plus snatch the inheritance of her former lover. The theme of rivalry — Flora’s bitter jealousy of the prettier and more talented Donatella permeates this provocative story and makes vengeance a ruleless game.

The central theme of the miniseries – an adaptation of the play of the same name by Dias Gomes – is the survival of man and his fight for what he believes in. The driving character of the narrative is the humble Zé do Burro, who, inconsolable, watches the suffering of Nicolau, his donkey, victim of an accident and decides to make a promise.