Best South American documentary movies
A curated collection of popular documentary movies from South America.
White Out, Black In (2014)
White Out, Black In (2014)
Shots fired inside a club frequented by black Brazilians in the outskirts of Brasilia leave two men wounded. A third man arrives from the future in order to investigate the incident and prove that the fault lies in the repressive society.
Emicida: AmarElo - It's All for Yesterday (2020)
Emicida: AmarElo - It's All for Yesterday (2020)
Between scenes from his concert in São Paulo's oft-inaccessible Theatro Municipal, rapper and activist Emicida celebrates the rich legacy of Black Brazilian culture.
Racionais MC's: From the Streets of São Paulo (2022)
Racionais MC's: From the Streets of São Paulo (2022)
Armed with music and a message, influential hip-hop group Racionais MC's turned their street poetry into a powerful movement in Brazil and beyond.
Madonna: The Celebration Tour in Rio (2024)
Madonna: The Celebration Tour in Rio (2024)
Madonna celebrates her four-decade career in a special concert for over 1.6 million people at the Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro.
Raul: O Início, o Fim e o Meio (2012)
Raul: O Início, o Fim e o Meio (2012)
As the world boiled in the rush of Easy Rider bikes, in the frenetic pace of Elvis Presley, in Beatniks poets, in the explosion of counterculture, a boy from Bahia gave birth to Rock in Brazil. A runaway flying saucer that abducted the hearts and minds of thousands of fans, Raul Seixas, a man who became a myth. Raul died young because he lived intensely. Rock n 'roll, free love, alternative society, drugs, black magic, military dictatorship, women and daughters. A man who wanted to live from his work and died for it. The beginning, the end and the middle are confused, because the story is not over. The film reveals through rare images of archive, meeting with relatives, conversations with artists, producers and friends, the trajectory of the legend of Rock.
Mussum: Um Filme do Cacildis (2019)
Mussum: Um Filme do Cacildis (2019)
The trajectory of musician and comedian Mussum as vocalist of the group "Os Originais do Samba" and later in cinema and TV as a member of "Os Trapalhões", a group that revolutionized the way of making humor on Brazilian television.
Mamonas Forever (2009)
Mamonas Forever (2009)
In less than ten months, the music band Mamonas Assassinas went from being completely unknown to becoming one of the biggest phenomena in Brazilian music. Irreverent, intelligent, sarcastic and creative, the band took over Brazil and sold two million albums in just six months. Never-before-seen footage and interviews from family, friends, producers, and musicians tell the band’s story, their challenges, their rise to fame, and the tragic aeroplane accident that killed all its members in 1996.
O Barato de Iacanga (2019)
O Barato de Iacanga (2019)
Participants recall a series of festivals held on a farm in Brazil during the '70s and '80s that evolved into liberating celebrations of music.
A Night in 67 (2010)
A Night in 67 (2010)
In the 1970s, "festivals" were incredibly popular in Brazil, as they were recorded before a live studio audience, and usually featured a number of elimination rounds. They also formed the springboard for the career of many a big-name stars, such as Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, Roberto Carlos and Gilberto Gil. Appearing on such a program was no cakewalk, however: audiences could be as wild in their condemnation as in their appreciation of an artist. Extensive archive footage (including performances and behind-the-scenes interviews) from the turbulent final evening of the Festival of Brazilian Popular Music 1967 paints a fascinating picture, not only of the transformation of Brazilian music into real "festival" music, but also of a society starting to buck against the yoke of military rule.
Rush in Rio (2003)
Rush in Rio (2003)
Legendary rock band Rush plays the Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on the final night of the band's 2002 Vapor Trails tour, in front of 40,000 fans.
Axé: Music of a People (2017)
Axé: Music of a People (2017)
Originally from Bahia and considered today one of the most globalised musical movements in the world, Axé is a musical rhythm that carries in its essence a good part of all the musical and cultural syncretism of Bahia. The documentary brings together interviews and archive images outlining the birth of Axé.
Cássia (2015)
Cássia (2015)
Cássia Eller Rejane. Cássia Eller. Cássia. A powerful restless force on stage, shined herself out of it. One of the greats of Brazilian music, Cássia Eller marked the 1990s and shocked the country with her early death in 2001. A film about the singer, the mother, the woman who exposed her personal life and broke barriers, leaving a beautiful social and artistic legacy.
This Was Tomorrow (2015)
This Was Tomorrow (2015)
The year 2015 will be chronicled as magical, mythical and memorable. The People of Tomorrow experienced Tomorrowland on three continents this year. After celebrating the 10th anniversary in Belgium in 2014 and putting ashore in the United States, the third chapter of our magnificent fairytale was written in Brazil for the very first time.
Tropicália (2012)
Tropicália (2012)
Set against the turbulent atmosphere of the 1960s, Tropicália is a feature length documentary exploring the Brazilian artistic movement known as Tropicália, and the struggle its artists endured to protect their right to freely express revolutionary thought against the traditional Brazilian music of that time.
Chico: Brazilian Artist (2015)
Chico: Brazilian Artist (2015)
Chico Buarque is a constant presence in Brazil's art scene and makes up its citizen's popular culture. This wealth in music, poems, theater and novels has been created over the last 50 years and in this film Chico Buarque converses about his memories, shows, daily life, work methods, creative process, in summary all his trajectory. The musician’s search for his German brother, whom he never got to meet, serves as one of the axis for the narrative.
Sepultura Endurance (2017)
Sepultura Endurance (2017)
The long awaited documentary about Sepultura's incredible journey from Brazil to the world.
Loki: Arnaldo Baptista (2009)
Loki: Arnaldo Baptista (2009)
Loki brings the trajectory of Arnaldo Baptista from childhood, passing through the most successful phase as leader of the Mutantes, marriage to singer Rita Lee and then separation. He also goes through the depression that devastated his life after the group ended and that led him to attempt suicide, his solo career, rapprochement with his brother and member of the Mutantes, Sérgio Dias, culminating in the band's return in 2006.
Sandy & Junior: Nossa História (2020)
Sandy & Junior: Nossa História (2020)
"Nossa História" was the ninth tour of the Brazilian duo Sandy & Junior, held between July and November 2019. The tour marks the reunion of the duo twelve years after their last shows in 2007. The show, recorded in São Paulo, was first released exclusively for Globoplay, and later made available on DVD.
Emicida: AmarElo – Ao Vivo (2021)
Larissa: The Other Side of Anitta (2025)
Vinicius de Moraes (2005)
Vinicius de Moraes (2005)
To celebrate the life and the work of a multifaceted creator – playwright, poet, partner of the most important names of Brazilian pop music and, above all, an enlightened character of the Brazilian cultural history - director Miguel Faria Jr. gathered an incomparable cast of partners, singers, friends and rare images from the archives recalling Vinícius’ genial simplicity, with the spontaneity, the humor, and the freedom of a person chatting over a bar table, exactly how the eternal Vinícius would enjoy.
Nasha Natasha (2020)
Nasha Natasha (2020)
International pop star Natalia Oreiro returns to western Europe for a non-stop concert tour through seventeen cities around the former USSR, traveling in the Orient Express. In this first person journey, Natalia also explores her personal and intimate life that started in a blue-collar neighborhood in Montevideo, Uruguay, and went into becoming a world-wide star and a Russian icon.
Twenty Years Later (1984)
Twenty Years Later (1984)
Eduardo Coutinho was filming a movie with the same name in the Northeast of Brazil, in 1964, when there came the military coup. He had to interrupt the project, and came back to it in 1981, looking for the same places and people, showing what had ocurred since then, and trying to gather a family whose patriarch, a political leader fighting for rights of country people, had been murdered.
The Battle of Chile: Part I (1975)
The Prisoner of the Iron Bars (2004)
The Prisoner of the Iron Bars (2004)
In 2002, the greatest prison in Latin America, Complex Carandiru, was demolished. A couple of months before its implosion, director Paulo Sacramento trained some inmates and together with his crew, they produced many hours of footage, showing daily life in prison.
Cinema Novo (2016)
Cinema Novo (2016)
A deep investigation, in the way of a poetic essay, on one of the main Latin American movements in cinema, analyzed via the thoughts of its main authors, who invented, in the early 1960s, a new way of making movies in Brazil, with a political attitude, always near to people's problems, that combined art and revolution.
Walt & El Grupo (2008)
Walt & El Grupo (2008)
The year was 1941, and the world was on the brink of war. In an effort to improve relations between the Americas, the Roosevelt administration called upon one of Hollywood’s most influential filmmakers to embark on a special goodwill tour. Written and directed by Theodore Thomas (“Frank and Ollie”) and produced by Kuniko Okubo, the documentary WALT & EL GRUPO chronicles the amazing ten-week trip that Walt Disney and his hand-picked group of artists and filmmaking talent (later known as “El Grupo”) took to South America at the behest of the U.S. Government as part of the Good Neighbor Policy.
The Edge of Democracy (2019)
The Edge of Democracy (2019)
A cautionary tale for these times of democracy in crisis—the personal and political fuse to explore one of the most dramatic periods in Brazilian history. With unprecedented access to Presidents Dilma Rousseff and Lula da Silva, we witness their rise and fall and the tragically polarized nation that remains.
The Salt of the Earth (2014)
The Salt of the Earth (2014)
During the last forty years, the photographer Sebastião Salgado has been travelling through the continents, in the footsteps of an ever-changing humanity. He has witnessed the major events of our recent history: international conflicts, starvations and exodus… He is now embarking on the discovery of pristine territories, of the wild fauna and flora, of grandiose landscapes: a huge photographic project which is a tribute to the planet's beauty. Salgado's life and work are revealed to us by his son, Juliano, who went with him during his last journeys, and by Wim Wenders, a photographer himself.