Like every other culture in this technologydominated world, Brazilian culture shows the influence of cinema. Film arbitrates life-styles, activates the imagination with its fantasies, and shapes moral life. Yet it is impossible to speak of the cinema in its Brazilian context without referring to North American film, whose influence and aggressiveness distributes North American culture throughout the world so that audiences now expect from all films only those images they are accustomed to seeing in Hollywood cinema.

The Brazilian public, which is economically and culturally much closer to the United States than to Europe, has also based its images of life on North. American films. A vicious circle: when most Brazilians make films, they make them “a la Americana,” and it is primarily for this reason that Brazilian spectators try to make any Brazilian film they view into a Brazilian film “a la Americana.”