Cinema, Poema e Gangrena

Documentary by Leon Hirszman about the economic conditions of film production in Brazil, produced in 1975 with sponsorship from Embrafilme and kept unreleased since then.

Founding a social Muay Thai project in the North Zone of Rio de Janeiro, Mestre BG and his competitors face the adversities of an underfunded project and fight to win their place on the podium. The challenges intensify when one of the students, Raíssa Pacheco, secures a spot to compete in a South American championship in Uruguay.

A making-of directed by Bodanzky himself, the documentary discusses the language of the film Iracema - Uma Transa Amazônica 30 years after it was made, gathering interviews with the authors, actors, critics and the filmmakers themselves.

Among bodies, jokes, eye-catching posters, and packed movie theaters, pornochanchada became one of the most popular- and contradictory- phenomena in Brazilian cinema. This documentary delves into a cinema of excess and irreverence to investigate how, during the military dictatorship, films apparently considered “minor” became box-office successes and exposed the fractures of a conservative, unequal, and closely watched country.