The Inffinito Brazilian Film Festival’s digital program runs September 13–30 with 40 free, scheduled screenings worldwide, including one editor’s personal picks from the lineup.
When the in-person program of the Inffinito Brazilian Film Festival closes in Miami on September 12, the 30th anniversary celebration doesn’t end. It moves online.
From September 13 to 30, inffinito.plus—the streaming platform built around the festival—is hosting a free, global showcase of 40 Brazilian films. No ticket, no city, no Portuguese required: viewers anywhere in the world can register at the festival’s official site and watch, in English subtitles, films that range from a 1990s Oscar contender to a documentary about a drag theater troupe that defied a military dictatorship.
The lineup is organized into three non-competitive showcases. The Glória Pires Tribute gathers eight films honoring this year’s tribute actress, including two she made with the same director more than a decade apart. CineBiography, curated by an all-women team, brings together six documentaries about figures who shaped Brazilian culture, from a legendary music venue to a master percussionist. And 30 Years of Inffinito revisits the festival’s own history through 25 previous winners of its Crystal Lens Award, spanning from the very first edition in 1997 to recent titles still unreleased in Brazilian theaters.
Every film has a scheduled window rather than an open-ended streaming slot—each title airs on a specific date, available from 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. Eastern Time, so it’s worth planning around the dates rather than assuming a title will still be there next week.
Editor’s picks in a lineup built by professionals
Forty films is a lot to sort through, so here are the ones I’d point a first-time viewer toward—choices shaped by what I think travels best to an audience discovering Brazilian cinema, and by a few titles I simply have a soft spot for. This is my own curation, not the festival’s; the full program was assembled by curators and programmers with far more range than any single list can cover, and it rewards browsing well beyond what’s highlighted here.
The film every Brazilian knows by heart
If you watch only one film from this program to understand Brazil rather than just enjoy a movie, make it A Dog’s Will (O Auto da Compadecida), screening September 17.
Directed by Guel Arraes and released in 2000, it’s adapted from Ariano Suassuna’s 1955 play—itself rooted in the cordel literature and oral storytelling traditions of Brazil’s Northeast—by way of a 1999 TV Globo miniseries. Set in the 1930s sertão of Paraíba, it follows two poor, quick-witted friends, João Grilo (Matheus Nachtergaele) and Chicó (Selton Mello), through a chain of schemes, a fake dog funeral, a bandit’s rampage and, eventually, a trial before Jesus and the Virgin Mary in the afterlife. Fernanda Montenegro plays the Compadecida of the title.
It became Brazil’s highest-grossing film of 2000, drew more than two million viewers, swept four prizes at the Grande Prêmio do Cinema Brasileiro and later placed among the 100 greatest Brazilian films ever made in a survey by the Brazilian Association of Cinema Studies. Its hold on Brazilian audiences hasn’t faded: a sequel released in late 2024 became the country’s biggest theatrical opening since the pandemic, pulling in a million viewers in its first week alone.
I’ll be honest about the catch: the humor is regional, built on Northeastern speech patterns, Catholic folk tradition and a very Brazilian relationship with religious authority, and some of it may not land immediately for viewers with no context. But that’s exactly why it belongs on this list. Few films offer as direct a window into what Brazilians mean by “Brazil profundo”—the interior, popular, deeply Catholic Brazil that rarely makes it into how the country is packaged for outsiders. It rewards patience with real insight.
The other side of Brazilian cinema’s rebirth
My other personal favorite is a very different film: The Trespasser (O Invasor), screening September 16.
Directed by Beto Brant and adapted from Marçal Aquino’s novel, it’s a lean, unsettling thriller from the early 2000s about two business partners, played by Marco Ricca and Alexandre Borges, who hire a hitman (Paulo Miklos, best known as the frontman of the rock band Titãs) to kill their third partner over a real estate contract—and then find him working his way into their lives. It won Best Director, Best Score and the Critics’ Award for Best Film at the 2001 Festival de Brasília and a jury prize at the Havana Film Festival, and it later inspired a French remake, Persona Non Grata, in 2019.
Where A Dog’s Will is about Brazil’s mythic interior, The Trespasser is about the moral rot of its urban middle class—corruption, class anxiety and violence dressed in a suit. It’s one of the defining titles of the “retomada,” the resurgence of Brazilian cinema in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and it holds up as one of the toughest, least sentimental Brazilian films of that era.
Glória Pires, in three very different registers
This year’s tribute actress, Glória Pires, has a career spanning more than five decades, and the online program is a genuinely useful crash course in her range. Three titles from her tribute showcase are worth seeking out in particular.
O Quatrilho (September 13), directed by Fábio Barreto, is where international audiences first met her in this context: set among Italian immigrant families in Rio Grande do Sul in the early twentieth century, it follows two couples whose lives unravel after an affair reshuffles both marriages. It became the first Brazilian film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film since O Pagador de Promessas in 1962, and Pires won Best Actress at the Havana Film Festival for the role.
Reaching for the Moon (Flores Raras, September 17), directed by Bruno Barreto, tells a very different story: the real-life romance between American poet Elizabeth Bishop, played by Miranda Otto, and Brazilian architect and landscape designer Lota de Macedo Soares, played by Pires. Bishop arrived in Brazil in 1951 expecting to stay two weeks and ended up staying fifteen years, living with Soares—who designed the landscaping for Rio’s Flamengo Park—in a relationship that shaped Bishop’s 1965 poetry collection Questions of Travel before ending in tragedy with Soares’s death in 1967. Based on Carmen L. Oliveira’s book Flores Raras e Banalíssimas, the film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (É Proibido Fumar, September 27), directed by Anna Muylaert, shows yet another side of Pires: a divorced clarinet teacher trying to quit cigarettes while renegotiating her family and love life. It’s a comedy with real bite, and it earned Pires Best Actress honors at both the Brasília Film Festival and the São Paulo Association of Art Critics.
Seen together, the three films are less a highlight reel than a demonstration of range—historical drama, transatlantic romance and character comedy, all carried by the same actress.
Three more worth clearing time for
Beyond my personal picks, three titles from the broader lineup deserve a mention on their own terms.
Dzi Croquettes (September 25) is a documentary, directed by Tatiana Issa and Raphael Alvarez, about the theater and dance troupe that used glam, gender-bending performance and biting satire to challenge Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s. Banned and censored by the regime, the group nonetheless became an early force in Brazil’s gay rights movement and found an unlikely champion in Liza Minnelli, who helped bring them international exposure. The film won Best Documentary at the Brazilian Academy of Cinema awards and screened at MoMA.
Executive Order (Medida Provisória, September 29) is actor Lázaro Ramos’s directorial debut, based on Aldri Anunciação’s play Namíbia, Não!. It imagines a near-future Brazil where a reparations lawsuit triggers a government decree ordering Black citizens deported to Africa, and follows the underground resistance that forms in response, with a cast led by Alfred Enoch, Taís Araújo and Seu Jorge. It’s speculative fiction used as a direct confrontation with Brazil’s unresolved history of slavery and racism.
Simonal (also September 29) is a biopic of singer Wilson Simonal, one of Brazil’s most popular performers of the 1960s, whose career collapsed almost overnight after he was publicly accused of informing on colleagues to the dictatorship’s political police—an allegation his family has spent years working to complicate and recontextualize. Fabrício Boliveira plays Simonal, with Ísis Valverde as his wife, Tereza. Paired on the same day as Executive Order, it makes for a pointed double feature on race, fame and state power in Brazil.
What to know before you log in
The Inffinito Brazilian Film Festival’s online program runs September 13 to 30, 2026, on inffinito.plus. All 40 films are free to watch, but registration on the festival’s official website is required.
Films are not available on demand for the full run of the program. Each title has its own scheduled date, streaming in a single window from 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. Eastern Time on that day only—so check the daily lineup before deciding when to log in.
All films are presented with English subtitles.
The online program follows the in-person edition, held September 3–12 at O Cinema South Beach, the Miami Beach Bandshell and Silverspot Cinema in Downtown Miami.
