43 Films & TV Shows Set In South America During The 1950s
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Private Fiction
🇦🇷 Argentina 🇮🇹 Italy The 1950s The 1960s The 1970sOver several days and nights, an actor and an actress read the correspondence between Torcuato and Kamala, the film director's parents, he from Argentina, and she from India. The letters, encompassing the decades from the 50s to the 70s, refer to love and idealism, record world travels, talk about socialism and psychoanalysis, about pain and broken dreams. Their reading reveals a relationship between the actors, with similarities and differences. Meanwhile, with his own daughter, the director sets about solving the puzzle of the family memory, an intimate twentieth-century tale.
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Algo con una mujer
🇦🇷 Argentina The 1950sIt’s 1955. Rosa a skillful seamstress becomes the only witness of a murder. In a time of political tension in Argentina, the crime’s investigation will trigger the final resolution of the conflict and sealed Rosa’s destiny for good. A typical crime film with the exception that the detective is a housewife.
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Madre Baile
🇦🇷 Argentina The 1950s The 1940sThe story of Leonor Marzano, creator of the cuarteto — After composing the theme that gives its name to her second solo album, “Madre baile”, Vivi Pozzebón becomes interested in the ethno-musical origins of the cuarteto and the figure of Leonor Marzano, who knew how to mix the tarantella and the paso doble on her piano to give rise to the characteristic rhythm of Córdoba: the cuartero. From here comes this record about the origin of the cuarteto from the 1940s to the present.
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Espero que Esta te Encontre e que Esteja Bem
🇧🇷 Brazil The 1950sA batch of 110 love letters exchanged by two lovers in the 1950s, discovered in Mato Grosso do Sul, is the starting point for this film.
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Invisible Life
🇧🇷 Brazil The 1950sA tropical melodrama — Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1950. In the conservative home of the Gusmão family, Eurídice and Guida are two inseparable sisters who support each other. While Guida can share with her younger sister the details of her romantic adventures, Eurídice finds in her older sister the encouragement she needs to pursue her dream of becoming a professional pianist.
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The Two Popes
🇻🇦 Holy See 🇦🇷 Argentina The 1970s The 1950s The 2000s The 2010sFrustrated with the direction of the church, Cardinal Bergoglio requests permission to retire in 2012 from Pope Benedict. Instead, facing scandal and self-doubt, the introspective Pope Benedict summons his harshest critic and future successor to Rome to reveal a secret that would shake the foundations of the Catholic Church.
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La pasión de Javier
🇵🇪 Peru The 1950s The 1960sA poet and guerrilla fighter — The life and times of Peruvian poet Javier Heraud in the 1950s and 1960s, including his university years and his involvement with Latin American guerrilla movements.
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Operation Finale
🇮🇱 Israel 🇦🇷 Argentina The 1960s The 1950s The 1940sAfter World War II, Hitler’s deadliest lieutenant escaped. — In 1960, a team of Israeli secret agents is deployed to find Adolf Eichmann, the infamous Nazi architect of the Holocaust, supposedly hidden in Argentina, and get him to Israel to be judged.
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Unidad XV
🇦🇷 Argentina The 1950sWith the Peronist government overthrown, with General Perón in exile and the Liberating Revolution in power, four renowned Peronist leaders are confined in the distant and cold Unit 15 of the Río Gallegos prison. Faced with the imminent execution to which the political prisoners will be assigned, they decide that the only option to survive is escape. Leaving aside their personal and ideological differences, they plan one of the most spectacular escapes in Argentine history.
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Pelé: Birth of a Legend
🇧🇷 Brazil The 1950s The 1960sA boy with nothing who changed everything. — The life story of Brazilian football legend, Pele.
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Endless Poetry
🇨🇱 Chile The 1950s The 1940sA portrait of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s young adulthood, set in the 1940s and 50s, in the electric capital city of Santiago. There, he decides to become a poet and is introduced, by destiny, into the foremost bohemian and artistic circle of the time.
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Red Gringo
🇦🇷 Argentina 🇨🇱 Chile The 1950s The 1960sDocumentary concerning North American pop/rock musician Dean Reed who achieves fame in Latin America in the 50s and 60s
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Eva Doesn't Sleep
🇦🇷 Argentina The 1950sIn 1952, Argentina's beloved First Lady, Eva Perón, died of cancer at the age of thirty-three. A renowned embalmer was commissioned by the grieving Juan Perón to preserve her body for display, and Argentines flocked to be near "Evita". Three years later, when his government was overthrown by a military coup, Perón fled the country before he could make arrangements for the transportation of his wife's body. The military junta now in control kidnapped the corpse; so afraid were they of Eva's symbolic power that they even made it illegal to utter her name.
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Chatô, The King of Brazil
🇧🇷 Brazil The 1930s The 1950s The 1960s The 1940sThe true story of Assis Chateaubriand, the first magnate of communications in Brazil. Due to his influence during the late 1930s up to the early 1960s, he has come to be called 'the Brazilian Citizen Kane'.
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Chicago Boys
🇨🇱 Chile Illinois The 1950s The 1970sThe economists behind the implementation of the most extreme capitalist system in the world observe with surprise the discontent of its countrymen. For the first time, they tell the story of how they became Milton Friedman's students in Chicago in the 1950s and what were they willing to do to pursue their extreme economic ideas, aided by Pinochet's dictatorship in the 70s. Unseen images and testimonies that allow us to understand the historic process that transformed the Chilean people and Chile in the country that it is today, an image of success and discontent.
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Getulio
🇧🇷 Brazil The 1950sThe movie depicts the political crisis that led to the suicide of president Getúlio Vargas, in the 19 days that preceded August 24, 1954. The crisis began with the attempted assassination of journalist and politician Carlos Lacerda in August 5, 1954, at rua Toneleros, Rio de Janeiro, in which Major Vaz was assassinated instead. Investigations pointed to Gregório Fortunato, chief of Vargas' personal guard, as the orderer of the frustrated assassination. This incident was one of the most importants in the history of Brazil.
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The Dance of Reality
🇨🇱 Chile The 1920s The 1930s The 1950s The 1940s“Having broken away from my illusory self, I was desperately seeking a path and a meaning to life.” This phrase perfectly sums up Alejandro Jodorowsky’s biographical project: reconstituting the incredible adventure of his life. Alejandro Jodorowsky was born in 1929 in Tocopilla, a coastal town on edge of the Chilean desert, where this film was shot. It was there where he discovered the fundamentals of reality, as he underwent an unhappy and alienated childhood as part of an uprooted family.
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Reaching for the Moon
🇧🇷 Brazil The 1960s The 1950sTwo iconic women. One passion. — In 1951, New York poet Elizabeth Bishop travels to Rio de Janeiro to visit Mary, a college friend. The shy Elizabeth is overwhelmed by Brazilian sensuality. She is the antithesis to Mary’s dashing partner, architect Lota de Macedo Soares. Mary is jealous, but unconventional Lota is determined to have both women at all costs. This eternal triangle plays out against the backdrop of the military coup of 1964. Bishop’s moving poems are at the core of a film which lushly illustrates a crucial phase in the life of this influential Pulitzer prize-winning poet.
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Juan y Eva
🇦🇷 Argentina The 1950s The 1940sThe earthquake in the city of San Juan, in January 1944, is the origin of the love story between Juan Domingo Perón (Osmar Nunez) and Eva Duarte (Julieta Diaz). He was a colonel in the Army and she was a popular radio actress. Eva collaborates with other artists in the collection organized by Peron, from the Secretary of Workr, to raise funds for earthquake victims. Neither then imagine what the future holds them.
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The German Friend
🇦🇷 Argentina The 1950sIt’s the late 1950s, and in an affluent and quietly respectable part of Buenos Aires, young Sulamit Löwenstein strikes up a friendship with her next-door neighbour Friedrich over the whereabouts of her family dog. She is the daughter of German-Jewish immigrants to Argentina, he is the son of a senior SS officer, a tragic political legacy from whose shadow both characters struggle to escape over the next three decades. Following the teenaged Friedrich to Germany, Sulamit finds him caught up in the radical politics of late-1960s student life; and she’s forced to make important decisions about her attitude to her homeland when Friedrich returns to Argentina to join the fight against the military junta.
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Heleno
🇧🇷 Brazil The 1950s The 1940sPassion. Decadence. Destruction. — José Henrique Fonseca crafts an ambitious and long overdue homage to a central icon in Brazil’s 20th century history. Reminiscent of film noir classics, the biopic tells the glorious and tragic story of the legendary football striker Heleno de Freitas. The sumptuous black and white cinematography reflects the chic life of Rio de Janeiro in the 1940s as it fell under the spell of sports royalty. Heleno was no doubt one of the most popular players of his time for his bravura in the field and magnificent goal-scoring that lead the Botafogo team to the top and himself into a vicious downward spiral.
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Lula, the Son of Brazil
🇧🇷 Brazil The 1970s The 1960s The 1940s The 1950sThe true story of a working class boy who moves to the nation's financial capital at a young age and becomes one the most influential politicians in Brazilian history.
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Boca
🇧🇷 Brazil The 1950sAdapted from his autobiography, the film recounts the story of Hiroito, The King of Boca do Lixo (a region in downtown São Paulo of the fifties where various nightclubs, strip joints, prostitution, bars, and drugs can be found). Hiroito was a well born bohemian and at the age of 21 was accused for the murder of his father, who was violently stabbed over 40 times with a razor. Hiroito was not charged, however two months after the death of his father, Hiroito bought two guns and moved to Boca do Lixo and became one of the most dangerous criminals of the region.
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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Connecticut Nevada 🇵🇪 Peru The 1950sThe adventure continues . . . — Set during the Cold War, the Soviets—led by sword-wielding Irina Spalko—are in search of a crystal skull which has supernatural powers related to a mystical Lost City of Gold. Indy is coerced to head to Peru at the behest of a young man whose friend—and Indy's colleague—Professor Oxley has been captured for his knowledge of the skull's whereabouts.
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El Benny
🇨🇺 Cuba 🇲🇽 Mexico 🇻🇪 Venezuela The 1950sBased on the life of Benny Moré, the film concentrates on a period in the early 1950s when Moré leaves the orchestra of Duany and starts his own 'Banda Gigante'. In flashback we learn of his success in Mexico. Moré is caught in the events connected to Batista's coup in Cuba. Also, he tours Venezuela, where he suffers the machinations of a vengeful businessman. After collapsing and being hospitalised, Moré swears off alcohol. Some years later, he encounters his old band-mate Monchy, fallen on hard times.
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