Globo Filmes, one of Brazil’s biggest film production forces, is set to back “Spring of the Dragon,” a fiction feature bio focusing on arguably the greatest of the country’s film directors, Novo Cinema icon Glauber Rocha.
The news comes as Globo Filmes and production house Conspiraçao have released new details about “The Brokers,” one of the Brazil’s most awaited movies marking the new film from Fernanda Torres, a Golden Globe winner and Oscar nominee for her star turn in Walter Salles’ Oscar winning “I’m Still Here.”
Andrucha Waddington (“The House of Sand”), a Berlinale Series Market winner this February for Globoplay series “Emergency 53,” directs and produces.
Produced by Vania Catani’s Bananeira Filmes (“Zama,” “Medusa”) and co-produced by Globo Filmes, “Spring of the Dragon” (“A Primavera do Dragão”) will adapt the same-titled non-fiction book by Nelson Motta.
Published in 2012, the book captures the makings of a director who came to symbolize the revolutionary spirit and excitement of Brazil’s 1960s Novo Cinema, taking the film world by storm, with “Black God, White Devil” which played Cannes main competition in 1964, when Rocha was only 25.
Set to shoot in the cities of Salvador, on Brazil’s Atlantic seaboard, as well as Rio de Janeiro and Cannes, “Spring of the Dragon” is written and directed by Rodrigo de Oliveira (“All the Paulos in the World”). Imagem Filmes will release in theaters in Brazil.
The announcement by Globo Filmes at Cannes is particularly appropriate. Three of Rocha’s films played Cannes main competition, the third, “Antonio das Mortes,” winning best director, making Rocha, two months after turning 30, the first Latin American filmmakers to win such an honor.
“The film’s style is that of Italian neo-realism infected by the cutting of Eisenstein and the audacity of the French New Wave,” U.K. newspaper Guardian said of “Black God, White Devil.” Admired by François Truffaut and Jean-Paul Sartre, Rocha was paid the ultimate compliment by Jean-Luc Godard, having refused to shoot a segment of 1970s “Wind From the East,” of appearing in the film as a man at a crossways pointing the direction of political cinema.
“The Brokers” (“Os corretores”), starring and also penned by Fernanda Torres, a writer on multiple films and series such as 2023’s admired “The End,” has recently wrapped filming in Rio de Janeiro.
Produced by Conspiração, in co-production with Globo Filmes and Sony Pictures Sony Pictures International Productions, Brazil — which will also handle distribution in the market via Sony Pictures in Brazil, “The Brokers” is directed by Andrucha Waddington, behind some of the most significant hits in Brazilian cinema and TV over the last decades, such as 2006 Sundance Festival winner “The House of Sand” and smash hit Globoplay series “Under Pressure.”
The feature film was shot over the last weeks across different areas of Rio de Janeiro, such as Copacabana, Tijuca, Santa Tereza, incorporating Rio’s urban diversity into the narrative.
Described as a “real estate tragicomedy” when Variety announced the title as a project, “The Brokers” centers on a couple who work in the business. “It is a story centred on characters shaped by ambition, affection and contemporary contradictions,” Globo Filmes observed Thursday.
The film’s Brazilian star cast includes Bruno Mazzeo, Milhem Cortaz, Fulvio Stefanini, Irene Ravache, Camila Márdila, George Sauma, Jaffar Bambirra, and Katiuscia Canoro. The film now has a new image.
“‘The Brokers’ is a real estate tragicomedy about the civic improvisation of Rio de Janeiro. The film tells the story of two broker brothers riding the wave of euphoria leading up to the World Cup and the Olympics Games in Brazil, selling square meters in Copacabana at Fifth Avenue prices,” Fernanda Torres told Variety.
“The humiliating 7–1 defeat suffered by the Brazilian national soccer team against Germany foreshadowed the bankruptcy to come. With the country plunged into an unprecedented political and economic crisis, the brothers end up becoming involved with the illegal construction mafia operating in Rio’s West Zone.”
She added: “It’s an unpretentious, local film — a script I had written before being completely swept up in the release campaign for “I’m Still Here”. When I returned to Rio, I wanted to finally bring the project to life, to work with my longtime partners — Andrucha, Bruno Mazzeo, and Conspiração — and make something simple and local, just to keep life moving, without the pressure of deciding what my next project after Walter’s film would be.“
For Waddington, “written by and starring Fernanda Torres, a longtime creative partner, “Os Corretores” portrays the brutal transformation of Rio de Janeiro through a tragicomic satire, focusing on the mechanism that best symbolizes this illusion: the real estate market.”
The director went on: “The film balances itself precisely between the delirious euphoria leading up to the World Cup and the Olympic Games and the hangover of the political, economic, and social decay that followed soon after, dragging its protagonists into situations that verge on the absurd.”
Fernanda Torres at the 97th Oscars held at the Dolby Theatre on March 2, 2025 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by JC Olivera/WWD via Getty Images)
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