Limite

Voted the greatest Brazilian film ever made by the Cinemateca Brasileira in 1988 and championed by Orson Welles, Sergei Eisenstein, David Bowie, and Caetano Veloso, Limite has been lost for decades. Now, thanks to the World Cinema Foundation (founded by Martin Scorsese), the restored film has regained its reputation as a landmarks of the glorious final years of silent cinema. The only film directed by novelist Mário Peixoto (then in his early 20s), Limite captures the mental states of a man and two women lost at sea in a rowboat, with their pasts conveyed via flashbacks. But more than anything else, Limite is a piece of virtuoso filmmaking, a key film in Brazilian film history, and one of the great, adventurous examples of the power of silent cinema. (114 mins., 2K DCP)

Print courtesy Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna.