Robert Ellis Miller

Fantasies and clichés about Brazil and Brazilians as reinforced by international films, even those actually shot in Brazil. This documentary features interviews with non-Brazilian directors, writers and stars who have been involved in some of those films.

Robert Ellis Miller has been dismissed as a director of "fluff" movies, but there are a few very specific elements that connect all this films. Any Wednesday (1966), Sweet November (1968), The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968), The Buttercup Chain (1970), The Girl from Petrovka (1974), and others suggest a world in which love is structured not around passion but contracts. The stories are built around sealed-off social environments. A small group, or individuals, enforce rules, rituals, and hierarchies that slowly turn malignant or unworkable.

How the cinema industry does not respect the author's work as it was conceived, how manipulates the motion pictures in order to make them easier to watch by an undemanding audience or even how mutilates them to adapt the original formats and runtimes to the restrictive frame of the television screen and the abusive requirements of advertising. (Followed by “Filmmakers in Action.”)