Ruy Polanah

Fitzcarraldo is a dreamer who plans to build an opera house in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, so, in order to finance his project, he embarks on an epic adventure to collect rubber, a very profitable product, in a remote and unexplored region of the rainforest.

In a company trading maté, workers are treated as slaves. Some of them try to escape, but those who are caught suffer severe punishments.

For ten years, engineer Bill Markham has searched tirelessly for his son Tommy who disappeared from the edge of the Brazilian rainforest. Miraculously, he finds the boy living among the reclusive Amazon tribe who adopted him. And that's when Bill's adventure truly begins. For his son is now a grown tribesman who moves skillfully through this beautiful-but-dangerous terrain, fearful only of those who would exploit it. And as Bill attempts to "rescue" him from the savagery of the untamed jungle, Tommy challenges Bill's idea of true civilization and his notions about who needs rescuing.

In a dark and decadent area of São Paulo, the exiled Americans Rosso and his son Paul own a brothel. Paul is a compulsive gambler addicted in cocaine and his father is married with the former prostitute Angie, and they have a little son. When a client is killed by his wife in their establishment, they find a suitcase with drugs.

A three-episode anthology film based on short stories by Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos.

Martin and Hazel Quarrier are small-town fundamentalist missionaries sent to the jungles of South America to convert the Indians. Their remote mission was previously run by the Catholics, before the natives murdered them all. They are sent by the pompous Leslie Huben, who runs the missionary effort in the area but who seems more concerned about competing with his Catholic 'rivals' than in the Indians themselves. Hazel is terrified of the Indians while Martin is fascinated. Soon American pilot Lewis Moon joins the Indian tribe but is attracted by Leslie's young wife, Andy. Can the interaction of these characters and cultures, and the advancing bulldozers of civilization, avoid disaster?

A Nazi scientist, wanted as a war criminal, develops a spider serum that turns people into fascist Nazi zombies. A pair of investigators who have devoted their lives to hunting down Nazi war criminals set out to stop him.

A brave and bold indigenous girl, protector of her jungle and its wild life and guided by her shaman grandfather, pairs with a boy from the big city, against animal traffickers in the Amazon forest.

After witnessing the assassination of her parents, Luzia is raised by a cowboy and starts behaving like the men of Brazilian "Sertão". As a grown-up, she sets out to find her parent's murderer, but ends up discovering love.

When Cunda, a man living deep in the Brazilian rainforest, is bitten by a snake, he has a hallucination of four chimpanzees. Once he recovers, he is shocked to find the four chimpanzees waiting for him at home, and, believing them to be special, decides to take them to the city in order to sell them.

A group of armed soldiers is sent to the Northeast of Brazil in an attempt to stop a famine-struck population from invading and stealing a food deposit in the dry backlands. While the alienation and insanity of people driven to hallucination by their latent hunger is conducted by the predictions of a religious figure, a truck driver observes the situation and remains torn between his friendship with the soldiers and his revolt against the lack of government action in fighting the misery that lingers over the region.

The film shows the drama of the young and fragile Lalinha. After being abandoned by her husband, who ran away with another, the girl seeks comfort on the farm where the two in-laws live and the widowed father-in-law. There, the girl discovers a new world.

A rock singer goes to Brazil to shoot a video, but winds up getting kidnapped and enduring a number of seemingly bizarre and hilarious events.

This epic Brazilian film was based on the equally epic novel by Antonio Callado. Set between 1954 and 1964, the film's focus is the saga of Jesuit priest Nando. Fed up with civilization, he ventures deep into Amazon country to live with and work among the Xingu Indians.

Orfeu is a popular composer from a samba school. He lives in the favela and falls madly in love when he meets Euridice, a newcomer to the neighborhood. But the local drug boss Lucinho stands between them and will drastically change both their lives.

According to an amazonian legend, every month, during the full moon, a brazilian fishing village receives a mysterious guest: the Dolphin, who transforms into a human to seduce and be loved by women and hated by men. One of her conquests is the daughter of a fisherman, who has a son with the Dolphin. He constantly reappears to seduce her, and even when she marries, he continues to look for her. This provokes the ire of the husband, who wants to kill him anyway.

After arguing with his ex-girlfriend, truck driver Jorge hits the road again, while remembering the past and questioning his friendship with his manipulative boss.

The writer Pia and the painter Gil live by the Rio Negro deep in the Amazon jungle. One night, during a lunar eclipse, Pia is murdered. Her death plunges Gil into a world of shadows. He leaves the town by the river and does not return to the house he shared with Pia until two years later. There, Pia is present in the flood of memories that keep coming back to him, and also lives on deep in his heart. This love, the comfort it brings him, and the girl Elsa lead him out of the darkness and back into the light, back to life. And he will meet Pia's murderer. 'Eclipse' is a love story set against the background of a crime: compelling, poetic, and delicately told.

The young warrior indian Tainá must now battle against biopirates, and is joined by a new boy from the big city and an indian little girl who wants to follow her steps as a protector of the jungle.

Poor people who live in the slums in Rio de Janeiro decide to occupy an empty apartment building in the rich part of the city. Meanwhile, a rich girl falls in love with a poor composer. Based on the musical play "Pobre Menina Rica", by Vinícius de Moraes and Carlos Lyra.

The Amazonian jungle, Brazil, 1987. Ruthless landowners are evicting peasants from their land. The peasants look to the priest for help, and are contemplating taking up arms. A stranger arrives who provides an answer to their plight.

Unable to endure the idea that he would go without punishment, a criminal's victim chases him the length and breadth of Brazil for a showdown.

Screenplay was a drama anthology television series, broadcast on BBC between 1986 and 1993. Numerous episodes were produced including one named "Boswell and Johnson's Tour of the Western Islands" starring Robbie Coltrane as English writer Samuel Johnson who in the autumn of 1773, visits the Hebrides off the north-west coast of Scotland. That episode was directed by John Byrne and co-starred John Sessions and Celia Imrie.