PROJECTS IN
DEVELOPMENT.

Rio de Janeiro, 1929. Ísis, a young nurse raised in an orphanage, works for Tomás Vasquez de Soverosa, a baron who grew wealthy during the Empire and is now confined to a decaying Art Deco mansion. When Tomás claims he is haunted and begins to bear inexplicable marks of violence, Ísis is drawn into a mystery that connects the house to her own past.

Between delirium and the supernatural, family secrets expose the structures of race, class, guilt and ambition hidden beneath the decay of Brazil’s old elite. Starring Thainá Duarte and Flávio Bauraqui. Written and directed by Rafael Peixoto. Distributed by Downtown Filmes.

Daniela, an unemployed journalist in debt, is pressured by her family to care for Vinícius, her older brother, who has been debilitated by a stroke. The problem is that Daniela has spent her entire life believing he sexually abused her as a child — a memory her own family insists on denying.

Living every day with the man she considers her abuser, she begins to investigate the past and, finding contradictions both in her family and in her own memories, must discover where memory ends and trauma begins. Starring Alicia dos Anjos, Humberto Carrão, Marieta Severo, Isabél Zuaa, Zezé Motta, Barbara Reis, Thomas Aquino and Carlos Francisco. Directed by Karen Suzane. Written by July Frans, Leonardo Lumas and Caio Pudenzi.

Isa is a Major in Brazil’s Military Police and a specialist in post-traumatic stress disorder. As she tries to reconstruct the fragmented memory of a police officer who was kidnapped and brutally tortured, she finds evidence that the operation which turned him into both hero and victim may have been built on a lie.

The clinical investigation advances as Isa faces the collapse of her marriage and the inevitable farewell to her son, who suffers from a fatal degenerative disease. Starring Isabelle Nassar.

The project combines psychological drama and police thriller, using recurring flashbacks that gradually come together as Isa reconstructs the patient’s trauma. Inspired by the experience of a psychologist from Rio’s Military Police medical team, it addresses PTSD, police suicide, mental health and the institutional structures of the force.

In 2130, a century after climate collapse destroyed coastal cities, Brazil’s northeastern backlands have become humanity’s refuge — but are once again divided into feudal possessions. When a water war must be ended by a marriage between two rival families, Murici, leader of the Baraúna family’s jagunços, is tasked with escorting the groom, Adilso, to his betrothed.

Lost in the desert, the two drink from a magical rain and fall in love, setting love, duty and the entire political order of their world on a collision course. A reimagining of Tristan and Isolde set in Brazil’s Northeast.

Evandro and Valentina shared a love interrupted by tragedy in their youth. Twenty-three years later, they unexpectedly meet again at the graduation of Beatriz, the niece raised by Evandro, and Arthur, Valentina’s adopted son — just as the two young people are about to start a life together.

Amid old wounds, new affections and choices that span generations, the quartet rediscovers their paths to the sound of more than twenty hit songs by Roupa Nova.

Selene Carvalho, a brilliant biologist whose professional and financial life is collapsing, and Guilherme Villefort, a powerful football businessman and owner of one of Brazil’s largest betting companies, discover they both need a heart transplant. Both have the extremely rare Rh-null blood condition — known as “golden blood” — and only one compatible heart becomes available to save them.

The fight for the organ sets the two families at war and exposes a system shaped by money, gambling, corruption and manipulation. When Daniel, Selene’s husband, invades the operating room to prevent her from losing her only chance to live, he triggers a tragedy whose consequences bind and destroy the Carvalho and Villefort families, while their children fall in love and begin to understand everything their parents were willing to do to survive. Created and written by Rafael Peixoto and Valéria Motta.

Intelligent and pragmatic, Dona Esmeralda supported her family alone with fierce competence. Never skilled at showing affection, she offered security: her own definition of love. Now, as her memory fails due to vascular dementia caused by decades of smoking and her body is weakened by a fall, the woman who once controlled everything depends on her children.

Amanda was the natural choice. Single, working from home and childless, she is the family’s “available” person and, like her mother, detests pity. But an unavoidable work deadline forces her to put her brother Vitor in her place for a few days. Unprepared for the role, Vitor freezes before his mother’s vulnerable body — and must face embarrassment, fear and tenderness alone in order to care for the woman he believed indestructible.

Then something unexpected happens: Esmeralda is happy with Vitor’s presence, while Amanda, monitoring everything from afar, feels not relief but… anger. As the siblings clash, Esmeralda searches for her own dignity. Along the way, her children realize they never truly knew the woman she was.

“A Gangorra” is a drama about care, memory and finitude, threaded with acid humor and poetry. Memory may betray us, but affection does not. Written by Valéria Motta and directed by Rafael Peixoto.

Alma, Flávio and Marco Antônio kidnap Cléo, a teenager from a wealthy family, and hold her in an isolated country house while awaiting instructions from a mysterious client. But the contact disappears, and the three begin to realize they have entered an operation far bigger than they imagined.

As Cléo grows closer to Alma and conflicting accounts of what is happening inside the hideout turn the kidnappers against one another, violence erupts. When deaths begin to accumulate and the girl’s powerful grandfather enters the game himself, it is no longer possible to know who is victim, perpetrator or manipulator.

After a career as a Family Court judge, Marinaldo retires and isolates himself on Paquetá Island, unable to live with the guilt of a decision in which he forced a mother to keep the father of her children in the family’s life — and the man went on to murder his ex-wife, his son and his mother-in-law.

Years later, the arrival of Cornélio, an equally lonely and sorrowful neighbour, and his granddaughter Amália, an intelligent, irreverent and impossible-to-ignore preteen, begins to break through his misanthropy. Gradually, the two older men grow closer through her, until they discover they are connected by the same tragedy: the new neighbour survived that massacre and is the killer’s father-in-law, while Amália, then a newborn, was the only child to escape.

When the killer is released and returns looking for the girl, the two men must turn the guilt that separates them into an alliance capable of protecting her.

Abelardo is a great actor who has seen better days. After the sudden death of Rosana, his second wife, he must support the household, rebuild his career and raise Júlia and Diogo — the teenage twins abandoned by his first wife — as well as Pedro, his ten-year-old son, all on his own.

To pay the bills, he takes any job his agent can get him — from embarrassing commercials to appearances dressed as a dinosaur — while trying to preserve some dignity in front of his children. Júlia navigates the contradictions of adolescence and MMA; Diogo discovers his sexuality and is mortified by his father’s jobs; Pedro still has not been able to process his mother’s death.

In the apartment below, Ninete, Rosana’s mother, helps the family while rediscovering her own sexuality and interfering in absolutely everything. Between professional failures, domestic conflicts and small victories, Abelardo discovers that perhaps his most important role is the one he never auditioned for: being a father.