Pornochanchada: A Brief History of Desire

Original title: Pornochanchada: Uma Breve História de Desejos

“In an age of repression and moralism, nothing sold better than the profane.”

Among bodies, jokes, eye-catching posters, and packed movie theaters, pornochanchada became one of the most popular- and contradictory- phenomena in Brazilian cinema. This documentary delves into a cinema of excess and irreverence to investigate how, during the military dictatorship, films apparently considered “minor” became box-office successes and exposed the fractures of a conservative, unequal, and closely watched country.