Nelson Pereira dos Santos is the first book in English to provide a full critical discussion of the films of Latin America's most important living director. A leader of the Cinema Novo movement, dos Santos is responsible for some of Brazil's most socially important and artistically engaging movies. Through a discussion of his films Dartene J. Sadlier chronicles dos Santos's career--his leftist committed cinema, his concern with the national and the popular, his chameleon style, his links to canonical Brazilian literature. She charts his moves from neo-realism to Godardian experimentation to a kind of popular realism and includes two highly informative interviews that reveal dos Santos's cultural, intellectual, and philosophical formation.