The Margin

Four marginalised figures wander along the polluted banks of the Tietê – their lives shaped by hunger, love and violence. Candeias replaces conventional narrative with gesture and landscape, creating a lyrical chronicle of the excluded. Finding fragile beauty in urban abandonment, the film would come to be regarded as a cornerstone of Cinema Marginal, a distinct but interconnected movement that radicalised Cinema Novo’s critique by adopting a trash aesthetic to shock audiences during the dictatorship.