When the Academy Awards take place on March 15th, few countries will be watching as closely as will Brazil. Last year, for the first time, a Brazilian film was nominated for best picture—“I’m Still Here”, set during the military dictatorship. Brazilians dressed in imitation of the golden trophy at carnival and hosted parties in homage to the film’s lead actress. “There are three terms everyone in the world knows: Coca-Cola, Jesus Christ and the Oscars,” says Fabiano Gullane, a producer in São Paulo. When the film took home an Oscar, “it was like winning a prize for the whole country.”
Brazil’s new fandomPhotograph: Dado Galderi/The New York Times/Eyevine
This year promises more. “The Secret Agent”, a drama by Kleber Mendonça Filho, is nominated for four Academy awards, including best picture and best actor. Brazilians are dressing up again. At a recent festival Rodrigo Teixeira, another producer, mused that cinema had overtaken the nation’s flagging football team as “the biggest source of pride for our country.”
Brazil’s sudden success has led to euphoria in a nation that has long been considered Latin America’s cinema laggard. Mexico, a land of film fanatics, has won over two dozen Academy awards. It boasts over 7,000 cinema screens, twice as many as Brazil. Brazilians agonise that Argentina, its main football rival, already has two Oscars to its name. Even slender Chile has won three. When a Brazilian agent tried to drum up interest in the films of Glauber Rocha, a celebrated local film-maker, in Europe in the 1960s, he lamented: “Glauber, truly nobody is interested in our films.”
The rise of Brazilian cinema is “not just a victory for the film sector, but a successful business case,” says Ana Paula Souza, a journalist who covers cinema. For decades, Brazil’s entertainment landscape was dominated by Rede Globo, a prolific producer of soppy telenovellas to which Brazilians were glued every evening. Much like old Hollywood, Globo produced everything in-house. It had the country’s best actors, screenwriters and directors on contract, and prevented them from working for other companies. The rest of the industry was left with the cinematic scraps of advertising and music videos. Cinema was the preserve of an intellectual elite, while paid television was non-existent. In 1992, amid a deep recession, only three locally made films got a national release.
State support and laws to foster competition turned things around. In 2002 the government set up Ancine, the cinema regulator. It collects data on Brazilian films and determines the number of days that films are exhibited. It also controls a fund for local film-makers. Then, in 2011, the country passed the “Paid TV Law”. Restrictions on foreign ownership of cable TV channels were lifted. Telecoms firms were allowed to compete. It also mandated that paid channels broadcast at least three and a half hours of Brazilian content every week during prime time, half of which had to be produced independently.
The law shook up Brazil’s film sector by cutting into Globo’s monopoly, says Eli Carter, an associate professor of Brazilian film and television at the University of Virginia. Though Globo remains dominant, independent production houses mushroomed to fill the mandatory weekly slots. The penetration of paid television rose from around 15% in the 2000s to almost half by the mid-2010s. By the time paid television lost market share to streaming services and the internet, Brazil had dozens of independent production houses up and running. Ancine’s fund for independent film-makers was awash with money.
The government of then President Jair Bolsonaro, a hard-right populist, cut funding for the arts, including Ancine. Mr Bolsonaro considered much artistic output to be “a waste of money”. Cinema audiences also shrank during the pandemic and have not recovered. Over half of Brazilian films shown in cinemas in 2025 sold fewer than 1,000 tickets. Industry focus has therefore shifted to streaming platforms, such as Netflix and HBO Max.
The big screen widens
“Today we have several big producers, big directors, big distributors: we have reached a mature moment,” says Caio Gullane, Fabiano’s brother and partner. “Now we need a second cycle, which means exporting our work abroad and increasing the market share of Brazilian productions in the country.” To achieve this, the Senate is discussing a “streaming law” that would force platforms to produce more local shows, display them on their home pages and pay Ancine’s tax benefiting local film-makers. It is expected to pass in the coming months, and would “extend what the paid television law did to the streaming sector,” says Mr Carter. It could double state support for the industry.
Brazilians have one final reason to hope that their good fortune will last: an internationalist turn by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The 10,000 members of the Beverly Hills-based organisation determine the Oscar winners. Since 2016, when actors criticised the Academy for over-representing white men, it has expanded its membership across continents. Today more than a fifth of members are not from the United States. This may have helped international productions—like the South Korean drama “Parasite”—to win big in recent years. “The language barrier no longer exists in Hollywood: it ended with ‘Parasite’,” says Mr Teixeira. Brazilians expect little joy from this year’s football World Cup. The Academy Awards just might deliver.
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