Boi de Prata

In vivid images, the documentary-like story of a drover and his family in the northern badlands of Brazil during the drought. A family in the search of new hope and destiny.

A new incarnation of Cangaceiro bandits, led by Coirana, has risen in the badlands. A blind landowner hires Antônio to wipe out his old nemesis. Yet after besting Coirana and accompanying the dying man to his mountain hideout, Antônio is moved by the plight of the Cangaceiro’s followers. The troubled hitman turns revolutionary, his gun and machete aimed towards his former masters.

Wanted for killing his boss, Manuel flees with his wife Rosa to the sertão, the barren landscape of Northern Brazil. Thrust into a primordial violent region, Manuel and Rosa come under the influence and control of a series of frightening figures.

Eldorado, a fictitious country in America, is sparkling with the internal struggle for political power. In the eye of this social convulsion, the jaded journalist Paulo Martins opposes two equally corrupt political candidates: a pseudopopulist and a conservative. In this context, Paulo is torn between the madness of the elite and the blind submission of the masses. But, in this complex tropical reality, nothing really is what it seems to be.

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.

Men work in a quarry on the edge of a hill where a slum is located, of which they are residents. The slope is blown up, advancing to the land near the shacks. Slum dwellers are warned that new explosions can cause damage. The community decides to place itself on the slope, preventing another explosion; without attitude, the foreman gives up on blowing up the hill.

Before Cinema Novo revolutionized the Brazilian cinematic scenery, a young craftsman and Bahian filmmaker had already paved the way for the beginning of the journey for some of the biggest and most popular films of Brazilian history. The documentary tells fragments of the story of director Roberto Pires, through snippets of his life and a journey through his body of work, interspersing archival footage, scenes of his films and an interview with his son, also a filmmaker, Petrus Pires, followed by a poetic narration and an original soundtrack inspired by his film Abrigo Nuclear.

Gabriel decides to go back to his home town. In the way, he meets "El Signo del Caos".

He was the most prolific within the New Portuguese Cinema generation. He would try western spaghetti, esoteric allegory, supernatural, and science-fiction. Without state subsidies, he would quit filmmaking in the 1990s. Who remembers António de Macedo?