Winner of the Best Director and Best Actor Awards at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival

Acclaimed filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacurau, Aquarius) teams up with renowned actor Wagner Moura (Civil War, Narcos)—giving an extraordinary, career-defining performance—to craft a thrillingly unpredictable, playfully shape-shifting epic steeped in history even as it feels remarkably contemporary; paying affectionate tribute to the movies of Filho’s youth while unfolding against the backdrop of political turmoil and palpable danger.

Amid the raucous revelry of Carnival week in 1977, a widower named Marcelo (Wagner Moura) arrives in Recife, Brazil, a city as vibrant as it is violent. A technology researcher who suddenly finds himself an unwitting target at the heart of the dictatorship’s political maelstrom, Marcelo is a man on the run from mercenary killers, ghosts of the past, and the ruthless, mischievously militant spirit of Brazil in 1977. Amidst these mounting threats, Marcelo—with the help of a mysterious woman named Elza, and her compatriots in the country’s growing underground resistance—remains primarily focused on escaping Brazil with his young son.