Edition 2026
Official Selection
New Voices
Docs
Two mid-length films about people caught in a harsh reality: a man fleeing corrupt police violence and a teacher whose clash with a student opens her eyes to the world she inhabits. Through long takes and the spoken word, Affonso Uchôa gives them a powerful voice.
In Seven Years in May, Rafael sits around an improvised campfire and recounts the night when he found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. In Disciplina, teenagers find an outlet for their problems in a kind of truth-or-dare game, challenging one another to speak out. Following the masterful feature Araby (FFG2017), filmmaker Affonso Uchôa has patiently and precisely continued to build his body of work in political and poetic docufiction. The spoken word – the age-old tradition of storytelling – is always at the heart of his films. Racism, poverty, police violence and institutional exclusion resonate powerfully throughout his cinema, where personal stories continually collide with the systems that shape and devastate individual lives. Even when working in the medium-length format, which is far from an obvious choice for the film industry, Uchôa remains one of the most distinctive and important voices in contemporary Brazilian cinema.