Leila Diniz
Birth : 1945-03-25, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Death : 1972-06-14
History
Leila Roque Diniz (25 March 1945 – 14 June 1972) was a Brazilian television, movie and theatre actress, whose liberal ideas and attitudes about sex had raised the discontent of both the feminists and the Brazilian military government of the 1960s.
Born in a middle-class family and the daughter of a communist activist, Leila worked as a kindergarten teacher at age 15. At age 17, she met movie director Domingos de Oliveira, with whom she lived until age 21. Between 1962 and 1964 she had minor roles on stage. In 1965, Diniz started working in television, where she made several telenovelas and various commercials. In 1967, she also started to make movies.
She died on 14 June 1972, aged 27, at the peak of fame, coming back from a movie festival in Australia, where she won a Best Actress award for the movie Mãos Vazias ("Empty Hands"), in the Japan Airlines Flight 471 crash in India.
Conducted from interviews with personalities who lived with Leila Diniz (1945-1972), the documentary is a record of an era and, above all, it rescues the participation in Brazilian culture of the actress who opened the way for the sexual revolution during the dark years of the dictatorship.
Self
"Portraits and excerpts from Brazilian films from all times. Actors, directors and images that affirm cinema."
Documentary on famous Brazilian actresses, female directors and the role of women in Brazilian film history.
Thanks
Documentary on famous Brazilian actresses, female directors and the role of women in Brazilian film history.
Self
A documentary that presents home movies and several excerpts of known films of famous actress Leila Diniz. Friends of the late actress, tragic killed on a plane crash in 1972, discuss about her life, her work and her legacy in Brazilian culture.
Pirata
On Carnival's eve, girl dreams of a man to stay with her during these four days. She meets a photographer, with whom she has an affair.
Leila
In a small town in the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil, a woman rebels against local morality after her child dies, with tragic results.
Eudóxia
Father Simão Bacamarte arrives in the small town of Serafim to investigate a certain phenomenon of madness.
Ela mesma
Two ladykillers living in Rio de Janeiro know no limits when courting a beautiful woman. A problem arises when one of them starts coming on to a girl, not knowing she's his buddy's daughter.
Dadá
An extended research tour of US university film programs introduced dos Santos to the American avant-garde filmmakers, among them Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage, who would directly inspire his formally radical adaptation of an allegorical short story about adultery and colonialism by Guilherme de Figueiredo. Filmed in both Manhattan and Brazil and set against the background of the Vietnam War and its protests, Hunger for Love uses a rigorously abstract soundtrack and narrative structure to evoke the acute paranoia of the period building up to the December 1968 military coup that tipped Brazil perilously close to a conservative dictatorship. With its harsh critique of the decadent tendencies of the Sixties counterculture, Hunger for Love offers a key expression of the self-consciously “ideological” phase of Cinema Novo. -Harvard Film Archive
Marta
Delfino, a quiet man who lives in Congonhas do Campo, a small historical town in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, is urged by his friend to steal the image of the Madona de Cedro (the Cedar Madonna), sculpted by Aleijadinho in the 18th century, from the town sanctuary.
A man gets locked naked outside of his apartment.
A volatile young man, Edu is a typical Rio de Janeiro middle-class kind, who flirts with multiple women at the same time. None of them, however, had managed to make him fall in love, until he met with mysterious Tatiana.
Servant (segment "Divertimento")
Two dark-comedy stories involving blackmail, murder and love triangles in Rio de Janeiro
Based on real-life Brazilian bandit "Mineirinho", the film follows the story of Zezé, a man falsely accused by sensasionalist press of being a high-caliber criminal who suddenly becomes one of the most wanted men of Rio de Janeiro.
Documentary about middle-class people in Rio de Janeiro, in the 1960s, when Brazil was going through a hard period in its history, with the military coup and the following dictatorship. Interviews with people in the street disclose their fears, aspirations and political alienation.
Originally produced for German TV, Improvised and Purposeful is a firsthand look at the "Cinema Novo" movement (otherwise known as the 'Brazilian New Wave'). Director Joaquim Pedro de Andrade focuses on six Cinema Novo filmmakers working in Rio in 1967.
Maria Alice
Womanizer suddenly finds a woman who makes him change the way he looks at women. He falls in love, and believes she is in fact all women in one. Because of that, he has to face an important decision: to go on with his old life or embrace this special relationship and become a monogamous man.
