It requires maturity to make a martial arts movie as deftly as Hou Hsiao-Hsien. The Taiwanese director of The Puppetmaster (1993) and Good Men, Good Women (1995) does not disappoint in his latest feature.

Nie Yinniang (Qi Shu), the 10-years old daughter of a general, is abducted by a nun who initiates her into martial arts. She transforms the young girl into an exceptional assassin, in a story that takes place during the Tang Dynasty (618-907) of Imperial China. One day, the master sends her pupil to her homeland because she failed a task. She also orders Yinniang to kill the man to whom she was betrothed. Two jade amulets (one held by Yinning and by one her fiance) symbolise their commitment.

The Assassin uses a prologue, a tradition dating back to antiquity (not just the China, but also in Greece, Rome and other ancient civilisations). This device is necessary in order to introduce some key facts before telling the story. This prologue is presented in black and white, and the Chinese characters in the opening credits resemble bloodied wounds.

The assassin in the film is a woman, who was raised and trained to kill with a sword or a dagger. Women rarely use such weapons because tradition requires that they keep a distance from their target. This is a very dirty and audacious twist.

The director said in an interview that he is always on the side of women, which is probably true. There is limited equality between men and women in modern China (with the males being widely considered superior), let alone over a millennium ago. It is easier to create a contemporary heroine such as Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 2003) now than at time The Assassin takes place.

Chinese Confucius described how to achieve harmony and balance wisely through philosophy. Martial arts represent another route to achieving these, as they were not created exclusively for the purpose of warmongering and self-defense. The equivalent is also found in the work of Roman poet Juvenal, who wrote: mens sana in corpore sano (“health mind in healthy body”). Yinniang’s training is also focused on wisdom, equilibrium and concentration.

The Assassin is not a celebration of violence. Quite the opposite: it is an elegy of the lost, noble values of Eastern civilisation such as patience. The long and wide shots invite you to think, to feel and to slow down your pace. Most of the sequences introduce the landscape or the house with all of their details at first, before characters appear. The viewer must conform themselves to nature and its timing.

There is harmony between the setting in Inner Mongolia and the narrative. The rupture of harmony is normally foretold by drumming. They are heard long before disruptive events – such as death or treason – take place.

Many elements from the Imperial China era are present: black magic, music, dance, ornaments as well as an effusive display of the Five Elements (water, wood, fire, metal and earth). The jade amulet is the most significant object in the movie, as it symbolises many virtues. Its rigidness signifies intelligence and justice, while its colour denotes loyalty and its transparency stands for sincerity. The assassin held such object throughout her exile. Perhaps for that reason, she displayed a very dignified behaviour upon reencountering her family.

The Assassin is about a woman who takes a long and dirty road into maturity without losing her honour and dignity. Hsiao-Hsien deservingly took the Palm D’Or for Best Director home last year, and the movie is now out in the best cinema screens in the UK and worldwide, and also available on DVD and Blu-ray.

Watch the film trailer below:

We are giving away three Blu-ray copies of The Assassin. Just e-mail us at info@dirtymovies.org and answer “what amulet did the assassin carry with her throughout her life?

In an Amazonian village in the middle of nowhere, former prostitute and still impressively good-looking Lavínia (Camila Pitanga), is married to bookish preacher Ernani (Zé Carlos Machado). The reasons for the unusual pairing are unclear at first, and only gradually revealed. Although her spiritual well-being is provided by her devoted husband, her libido is blatant and needs nourishing. This is when handsome photographer Cauby (Gustavo Machado) lavishes the needs of the skittish woman and shakes the foundations of a stable relationship.

There are many extremely steamy encounters between Lavínia and Cauby, with the female feeling torn between the needs of the body and the soul. The sex scenes between both ends of this love triangle are in stark contrast: the adulterous relations are portrayed with roving camerawork and saturated colours, while marital relations and whitewashed flashbacks of the preacher on a mission to “save” the former harlot with are almost static.

The cinematography is flawless, carefully concocted by directorial duo Beto Brant and Renato Ciasca. They repeat a collaboration already proven effective, adapting again a novel by Marçal Aquino as they did with The Trespasser in 2001. This extensive care with the image gave the melodrama almost a surgical undertone, allowing audiences to examine very private moments in very close, almost graphic detail.

Brant and Ciasca are successful in subverting the soapy expectations of Latin American melodrama without breaking its formula. They go beyond the stereotypical and heavy-handed characterisation of the telenovelas, exploring taboo themes and daring to strip naked, but still making good use of the social realism for which Brazilian soaps are renowned.

The cast is also to be praised. Pitanga portrayal of a broken woman struggling to find the balance between desire and needs is superb. Both Zé Carlos and Gustavo Machado delivery of their characters is compelling, allowing the audience to investigate the role they play in the construction of the female character’s psyche.

The male characters per se, however, were never fully develop. Their existence seems limited and defined by the construction of Lavínia’s psyche. Great symbolic scenes (such as Ernani’s desperate stroll on the streets of Rio looking for his runaway protégée; or Cauby’s arrest) were empty or mostly lost. This is because they were disconnected from the only fully-formed character, Lavínia.

I’d Receive the Worst News from Your Beautiful Lips is a very lyrical and convincing Latin American melodrama, despite its shortfalls. The magical panoramic images of the idyllic Santarém in the northern Brazilian state of Pará, combined with the harsh tones presented in the Rio de Janeiro scenes form an explosive combo, filled with steamy fully nude sex scenes. While a little raunchy and racy, the imagery of the film is fine and elegant, and never gratuitous.

The film received limited theatrical release outside Brazil, but it is now available for purchasing in various international and online outlets. DMovies selected it as one of “the dirtiest Brazilian films of the past 10 years”.

Brazilian presidential hopeful Levy Fidélix claimed during a nationally televised debate in September 2014 that Brazil’s population of 200 million would be reduced by half if homosexuality were encouraged. This is because “the excretory system” does not function as a means of reproduction. He also stated that gay people “need psychological care” and should be kept “well away” from the rest of the population.

The country’s LGBT quickly noted that his mother was the living proof that his claim was wrong: the excretory system does indeed function as a means of reproduction, and Levy himself is the byproduct of such interaction. They also successfully sued him for hate speech of homophobic content.

This year Brazilian cinema then responded with Here Come the Brides, a very touching, personal documentary about gay marriage in Brazil. It focus on the filmmaker Fábia Sartori Fuzeti herself, who opens the film by proposing to her partner Gabriela Torrezani. The movie follows their footsteps from that moment until their big day. At the same time, it explores the lives various gay and lesbian couples that got tied the knot since the Brazilian Supreme Court legalised gay marriage in June 2011.

A few gay films have been made in Brazil in the past few years, such as Futuro Beach (Karim Ainouz, 2015) and The Way He Looks (Daniel Ribeiro, 2015) – just click on the name of the films in order to accede to the dirty review. Here Come the Brides is the first to investigate both the legal and the social challenges of gay marriage. Jurists explain in detail the benefits as well as the shortcomings of gay marriage in Brazil, while Gabriela gives an emotional account of her disappointment of the refusal by all of her four grandparents to attend her wedding.

The movie also includes an interview with Luciana Genro, the presidential hopeful that asked the question in the debate, which triggered Fidélix’s homophobic rant. Genro is staunchly pro-gay rights, and was the first person to raise such an issue in a presidential debate. On the days following the event, all presidential candidates (including re-elected president Dilma) criticised Fidélix’s comments.

Here Come The Brides reveals that Brazil is one of the 22 countries in the world, which universally recognise gay marriage, and yet it has the largest number of gay murders worldwide (at nearly one a day). It also shows that acceptance is quickly improving, despite fierce resistance from the ultra-conservative antediluvian evangelicals, such as Fidélix himself. They insist in associating homosexuality with anal sex in an attempt to paint gay marriage it as dirty and unnatural.

Fuzeti and Torrezani and reveal that gay marriage is far beyond sex, let alone anal sex. The only filth here is in the twisted morality of the fundamentalists.

The film is 50 minutes long and targeted primarily at television. Other countries, particularly those that are yet to legalise gay marriage, would enormously benefit from a very real, intimate and riveting love story such as this one. DMovies selected it as one of “the dirtiest Brazilian films of the past 10 years”.

The latest feature by Brazilian veteran Karim Ainouz tells the story of Donato, a lifeguard from the Brazilian Northeastern city of Fortaleza who moves to Berlin in order to live with his lover Konrad. They met while Donato was working and rescued the drowning German from the violent waters of the beach in the film title.

In Futuro Beach, immigration to Europe has tragic consequences for Donato, but not because he is an illegal alien (in fact, the film never delves with his immigration status and journey to Europe) nor because he fails to adapt to the new culture. After a few years in Berlin, Donato speaks fluent German and is fully settled in his new home. Unlike in the Brazilian classic Foreign Land (Walter Salles/ Daniela Thomas, 1996), longing is not a central theme in the film.

Neither are homosexuality and homophobia. The gay romance is a secondary theme, and always treated with naturalism. The love scenes are uncontrived and powerful. Futuro Beach is not a militant gay film – and this came as a disappointment to many liberal activists because gay rights is such a hot topic in Brazil right now. It also a sharp move away from the gay, camp and passionate Madame Satã – the story of a very dysfunctional and subversive gay artist – which Ainouz directed in 2002.

The central theme of Futuro Beach is violent rupture. After failing to return to Brazil (in what was intended to be a short trip to Germany), Donato never attempts to contact his family again. At first he does not want to stay in Germany, but then he decides to cut all links with Brazil. He made the dirty decision to abandon and deny his family in Brazil because he is unable to reconcile his split allegiances.

In last third of the film, Donato’s younger brother Ayrton travels to Berlin as an adult in order to find the brother who abandoned his family years earlier, when he was still a child. Ayrton has even learnt some German before travelling to the German capital, lest his older brother could no longer speak any Portuguese. He is very angry upon finding his eloping brother, who did not even know that their mother died about an year earlier.

Futuro Beach is a slow-paced film with strong visuals and a sparse dialogue, a skillfully-crafted lyrical commentary on immigration, sexuality, life and death. The characters and the narrative feel stoic in nature, in a manner more akin to European (the likes of Bergman and Rohmer) than to Brazilian cinema (more used to fast-paced films and epic emotions).

The story is also full of symbolisms. Water both unites and separates: it takes away the life of Konrad’s friend Heiko in the opening of the film (in an unspecified accident where Konrad is saved by Donato), but it also separates Europe from Brazil. Donato at first misses the ocean in Berlin, and at the end of the movie he makes peace with his brother in the sands of a retiring sea in what seems to be the north of Germany. Water is always present in Donato’s work: first as a lifeguard (in Brazil), then in an aquarium and finally in a public bath (in Germany). Donato’s and allegiances and work relations feel as fluid as water.

The beach in the end of the film is very cold, windy, grey and populated with images of blackbirds, in sharp contrast to Futuro Beach in Fortaleza. The chosen home of the immigrant looks like a bleak and distorted version of his homeland. Yet this is where reconciliation between Donato and his younger brother Ayrton occurs. Futuro Beach is a eulogy of love and the difficult decisions that an immigrant has to make.

Futuro Beach premiered in the UK and most of Europe in 2015 and it was selected as one of “the dirtiest Brazilian films of the past 10 years”.

The Batman and Robin 1960s TV series was probably one of the campest pop products mass media has ever churned out. Although younger generations know Batman as the dark, glum hero with a painful past, back then he was a riotous, colourful and shrieking creature .

Fast forward to Brazilian cinema, 2014. The aging gay superheros live in a trailer in a post-apocalyptic world. Welcome to Batguano, one of the dirtiest, most daring and off-kilter films to come out of Brazil in recent years.

It has none of the favela, violence and social themes that populate most of mainstream and indie movies in the country. The director Tavinho Teixeira plays a very sexy Robin. The Boy Wonder has an added moustache, which makes him look older.

Batguano is a very authorial film made possible with the support from regional arts grants. Tavinho is based in João Pessoa, the capital of the impoverished Northeastern state of Paraíba. The director also got a bank loan to cover the remaining budget demands. In total, the film cost just R$100K, or about £17K. It was shot over 12 days inside a warehouse in Mamanguape in Paraíba. Tavinho casted veteran actor Everaldo Pontes to play the ageing, one-armed Batman.

The film kicks off with a cruising scene in an outdoors plantation, firmly in the realms of the tropics. It then moves indoors to an elaborate setting where the couple spends their days watching television. They sit next to a trailer inside what seems like an abandoned film studio. It feels like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) starred by two cartoonish Norma Desmonds (the ageing and forgotten film star in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, from 1950).

The world has been devastated by a pest spread through the bat and human faeces (“guano” means manure in the native South American language Quechua). Humans are leaving cities and going back the countryside in a bid to survive. Meanwhile, the pair hope for cash they may get from auctioning Batman’s severed arm. They spend their days in this state of suspended living, feeding on memories, irony and each other’s company.

Alternating between bitterness, humour and melancholy, Batguano is a film about ageing. Using a disabled superhero with a sardonic sidekick is a very effective concept to get close to the reality of advanced age and the accompanying feelings of obsolescence, nihilism and cynicism. Aging is the real apocalypse.

The film climaxes when Batman and Robin get into a car to drive around the city. In the best of old Hollywood style, the illusion of movement is created through a backdrop projection of street scenes. The result is beautiful and riveting, an ode to cinema as the dream factory, the escape route that we desperately need sometimes. Amidst the debris of post-industrial civilization, Batguano is teeming with hope, poetry, humour and a very human touch.

Batguano is an exponent of Brazilian marginal cinema, but it has hardly been showcased outside the country. DMovies selected it as one of “the dirtiest Brazilian films of the past 10 years”. It’s not too late for the flying mammal to spread its wings across the Atlantic.

The beauty of the city of Recife is in the most unlikely places: stilted shacks in a muddy shanty town, open sewers, swimming rats, decaying food, dilapidated buildings and grafitied walls. Cláudio Assis portrays Recife is a strangely repulsive yet powerful, dazzling and even charming way. The director translated the dirt and chaos in his hometown into visual poetry.

Irandhir Santos – who is also the protagonist of Neighbouring Sounds (Kleber Mendonça Filho/2012; click on the film title in order to accede to the review), made in the same city – plays marginal poet and bon vivant Zizo. He lives in a small community in the derelict Estelita docklands, where he mingles with bohemian and artists of all types. He enjoys sex with multiple partners, particularly bigger and older women. He advocates anarchy, free love and street nudity to those surrounding him. He gently wraps nearly every moment he lives in energetic and vigorous poetry.

In one key moment of the film, Zizo masturbates while touching and leaning into a photocopier. This scene is akin to one in Neighbouring Sounds, when Bia (Mave Jinkings) masturbates to the vibrations of a washing machine.

Pazinho (Matheus Nachtergaele) is one of Zizo’s best friend. who is desperately in love with a bosomy transvestite (he calls her “the man of my life”). Others close associates include the good-looking Boca (Juliano Cazarré) and Eneida (Nanda Costa). All these people seem to live as freely as they wish, and sexual experimentation (orgies, golden shower, etc) is an integral part of their lives. Poetry is almost invariably orgasmic.

Rat fever is an expression from Northeastern Brazil which means losing control, going insane. Just like in Ulrich Sedil’s Dog Days (the film title is a German expression with a very similar meaning), the characters in Rat Fever disregard social conventions. The difference is that the madness and defiance only lasts a few hot summer days in the Austrian piece, while in the Brazilian movie it feels like a lifetime statement. The rat fever contaminates the soul of the artist and his associates and simply does not wear off.

Cláudio Assis’s film is a affront to Brazilian middle class petit-bourgeois values and morals. It confronts and instigates the viewer by displaying sexual and poetic freedom in an overt and graphic manner. The average viewer does not appreciate such liberties, and the film is unsurprising that triggered estrangement and discomfort amongst mainstream audiences, with many viewers leaving the cinema theatre. Many labelled the film as tasteless and exploitative.

Rat Fever is indeed extremely dirty, be it for the golden showers, the orgies, the constant drunkenness or – most importantly – the shamelessness in experimenting. This dirt is both intriguing and beguiling, rendering the film exquisitely lyrical and profound. Just like his characters, Assis embraced artistic freedom upon making this subversive piece: the filming is entirely in black and white, the narrative is very loose and the camera angles are often very unusual (most sex sequences are filmed from above, as if God was mischievously peeking on the profane).

Oppression is also a central theme. In the end of the movie, Zizo is arrested, beaten and killed by the police. Biblical themes are also pervasive: Zizo’s poetry often questions whether God exists and Boca once jokes that neither heaven nor hell could be more fun than debauched Recife.

Rat Fever is a tribute to artistic and sexual freedom that adeptly uses poetry and explicit imagery as cinematic devices. Sadly, it has limited distribution outside Brazil, but worthwhile making an effort to find and to watch it. Cláudio Assis next film, Big Jato, will be launched this year.

DMovies selected Rat Fever as one of “the dirtiest Brazilian films of the past 10 years”, and it also made it to the top five. Don’t forget to vote for it if you think that it is the “dirtiest one of all” (poll on the top right).

Most Brazilian films made in the past two decades portray social and political woes opposed to the cultural and natural wonders of the country. They forge an atmosphere of survival despite the adversities, of resilience in a hostile and predatory environment. The Year My Parents Went on Vacation is no exception.

In his film, however, Hamburger dares to address these themes from a very unusual perspective, placing children characters at the centre of the saga. The director had previously directed various children TV shows, and here he successfully manages to transpose his experience to cinema in The Year My Parents Went on Vacation. This is evidenced in the subtle and delicate presentation of the film’s protagonist, and the magic and innocence through which he sees the world and events surrounding him.

Mauro is a boy in love with football and button football living in Brazil in the 1970s. Relatives take him from his house in Belo Horizonte and drop him in a Jewish district of São Paulo, where he is to spend time with his grandfather – whom he never met before – while his parents “are gone on vacation”. Upon arrival, the boy encounters an unexpected twist: his grandfather has just died. He then approaches the neighbour, an old Jewish man called Shlomo, and also befriends a group of young kids, who are also passionate about football. He discovers new friendships, new passions and slowly settles into a new community, which at first seemed to reject him. His mother then returns from the alleged “vacations”, which were in fact a political exile fro the Brazilian military dictatorship.

The story portrayed is very politically correct, and it evokes responsive mimicry with the child protagonist. The oppressive regime and the euphoria surrounding the 1970 Word Cup (which Brazil won) are strangely harmonious with the difficulties faced by Mauro. The script is utterly delicate and humane, which is rare in Brazilian cinema.

The entire narrative of the film foretells a sad ending, and the climax of the story is well construed with the passions of Mauro. The football goalkeeper is used as metaphor of the unsung, lone hero, and often compared to Mauro’s predicament.

The film also has its shortcomings. The child actors are somewhat inexperienced, often rendering the piece long and laborious. The film also fails to delve with central themes in more detail, such as forged family connections and loss of innocence when exposed to a strange and dirty world. In addition, there are confusing references as to how Mauro’s parents resisted the dictatorship, jeopardising the rhythm and the dynamics of the movie. The portrayal of Jews, Greeks and Italian in 1970s São Paulo is also somewhat stereotyped.

The Year My Parents Went On Vacation is a fun and entertaining family movie. It is also very educational, in highlighting futile jingoism at very troubled times. It is a refreshing break from the violent favela mainstream Brazilian movies made at the time – such as City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2003) and Elite Squad (José Padilha, 2006). Perhaps this is why it was submitted to the Oscars in 2007 (instead of Padilha’s movie). It is an easily-digested film about a very thorny political subject. Above all, it is a film about Brazilian people and culture. It received various international accolades and has been shown in all corners of the planet.

This film was selected by DMovies as one of the 16 dirtiest films of the past 10 years in Brazil.

Matheus Naechtergaele is a renowned Brazilian actor. He played the leading character in The Dog’s Will (Miguel Arraes, 2000), a widely-acclaimed comic and sharp denunciation of religious fanaticism in Brazil. The Dead Girl’s Feast is Naechtergaele’s powerful debut as a director, which draws religious themes similar to those in Arraes’s film, combined with deeply subversive Hitchcockian elements.

The Dead Girl’s Feast portrays the life in a small riverside town in the depths of the Amazon forest, where locals venerate Santinho (Daniel de Oliveira), a young man who allegedly inherited divine and healing powers from his mother (played by Cassia Kis). Legend has that she obtained such abilities after receiving the blood-stained, ragged dress of a missing girl from the mouth of a dog. The film culminates in the festivities of 20th anniversary of the event, when the dead girl is able to speak through Santinho’s mouth in front of the large admiring crowd. The film was inspired by a similar real event that Naechtergaele witnessed during the making of The Dog’s Will.

The film has remarkable similarities with Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960): it opens with the main character in their underwear after having forbidden sexual activity. Instead of Marion Crane having unmarried sex (a major taboo at the time in 1960), here we have Santinho having an incestuous embrace with his father (Jackson Antunes). In the last sequence of Psycho, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is in a prison cell as his mouth speaks for both himself and his mother, in an episode of split personality. In the end of The Dead Girl’s Feast, Santinho speaks for two people, himself and the girl, through his mouth in an episode of alleged possession.

There are more elements in common with Hitchcock’s masterpiece, including incest and cross-dressing. Both Santinho and Norman Bates are short-tempered, self-obsessed lunatics prone to violent outburts, at times camp and effeminate. Both characters impersonate their dead mother: Santinho through sex his father, and Bates through impersonation. The actors (Oliveira and Perkins) have similar facial features; Santinho even has Bate’s psychotic spark in his deep and black eyes,

Brazilian cinema has a tradition of anthropophagy, which was taken from a literary movement in the 1920s. It means that Brazilian filmmakers absorb/ eat international cultural tendencies and regurgitate them in an entirely new, Brazilian way. This is precisely what Naechtergaele did with Hitchcock’s Psycho, thereby transporting the Bates Motel to shabby houses in the remote jungle.

The Dead Girl’s Feast does not resemble Hitchcock in every way, however. Naechtergaele gave up suspense elements in favour of a more naturalistic and Brechtian Look. His cinematography is more reminiscent of Michael Ballhaus in Martha (RW Fassbinder, 1973) than of John L Russell and Hitchcock. In addition, several animals are killed, and the squealing of a dying pig can be heard several times throughout the film, rendering it uncomfortable and painful to watch.

Such dirty and subversive elements are a suitable backdrop to the absurdity of religious fanaticism. No incestuous act or slaughtering is less preposterous than the religious veneration of Santinho by his followers.

Naechtergale’s debut received wide critical acclaim and various prizes, including Best Film Award in Gramado, the largest film festival in Brazil. It remains to be seen whether Naechtergaele will continue to direct and eventually establish himself as the enfant terrible of Brazilian cinema. DMovies selected The Dead Girl’s Feast as one of “the dirtiest Brazilian films of the past 10 years”.