Two periods of Brazilian film history are particularly notable for their artistic momentum: the Cinema Novo movement of the 1960s and early '70s, and the film revival from the mid 1990s onwards. What makes them especially strong, this book argues, is their utopian impulse. By adopting Utopia as a theme, as well as a method of film analysis, Lucia Nagib unveils, organises and interprets a fascinating wealth of recurrent images, which are a bridge between a cinema strongly concerned with the national project and another informed by global culture. Outstanding recent films, such as "Central Station", "Perfumed Ball", "Hans Staden", "Orfeu", "City of God" and "The Trespasser", are illuminated by Nagib's sharp analysis, which detects utopian, anti-utopian and even dystopian impulses in them. They are at once representatives of a political arena in constant struggle against underdevelopment and legitimate (as well as critical) heirs of past cinematic traditions.
Throwing new light on a large selection of Cinema Novo and contemporary films, this book thus presents a national cinema that rejects the end of history and of film history, while benefiting from, and contributing to, a new transnational aesthetics.

Lúcia Nagib is Professor of Film and Director of the Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures (CFAC) at the University of Reading. Her research has focused, among other subjects, on polycentric approaches to world cinema, new waves and new cinemas, cinematic realism and intermediality. She is the author of World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (Continuum, 2011), Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (I.B. Tauris, 2007), The Brazilian Film Revival: Interviews with 90 Filmmakers of the 90s (Editora 34, 2002), Born of the Ashes: The Auteur and the Individual in Oshima's Films (Edusp, 1995), Around the Japanese Nouvelle Vague (Editora da Unicamp, 1993) and Werner Herzog: Film as Reality (EstaçãoLiberdade, 1991). She is the editor of Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film (with Anne Jerslev, 2013), Theorizing World Cinema (with Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah, I.B. Tauris, 2011), Realism and the Audiovisual Media (with Cecília Mello, Palgrave, 2009), The New Brazilian Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2003), Master Mizoguchi (Navegar, 1990) and Ozu (Marco Zero, 1990).