Literary adaptation in contemporary Brazilian movies

Abstract

This article seeks to investigate the ways through which the contemporary Brazilian cinema – conventionally dated from 1995 – has appropriated literary sources to create its movies. Starting from a panoramic evaluation, we select, from all the fictional long-length films in the period, those which evidently use a literary adaptation as a stylistic strategy of narrative construction. After that, we analyze the choices of sources from the literary genre and the historical moment. From that, we foresee the preferences of contemporary Brazilian cinema concerning literary adaptation as a specific procedure of symbolic representation.