Madame Satã

Presented by UCLA Film & Television Archive and Film Quarterly. Register at cinema.ucla.edu to attend this in-theater screening.

In-person: Director Karim Aïnouz

Director Karim Aïnouz brings a visceral, sensuous take to a biopic well suited to his subject, João Francisco dos Santos. The Afro-Brazilian descendent of enslaved people, dos Santos became a living legend as an openly gay, street-fighting caberet star whose drag persona Madame Satã (after DeMille’s Madame Satan) revolutionized Brazilian Carnival culture in the 1940s.

The film begins years before when dos Santos (Lázaro Ramos) was still just an outlaw hustling in Lapa, Rio de Janeiro’s crumbling red light district. A master of capoeira with an affinity for Scheherazade and Josephine Baker, dos Santos battles cops and cons alike, drawing around him a tender family of outcasts, prostitutes and petty thieves. Lázaro Ramos channels these seeming contradictions into a stunning performance culminating in Madame Satã’s first appearance on stage. Twenty years after its original release, Madame Satã still seethes with liberating energy from start to finish.

(2002, dir. Karim Aïnouz, 35mm, color, 105 min.)