After the 1880s onwards film had grew significantly with even the smallest towns in north-eastern Brazil having their own cinema houses by the 1930s which screen Hollywood movies. In the 1930s many chanchadas films had been popularized and these dominated the cinema and they also starred a very young and beautiful Carmen Miranda. The years of the 1950s and 1960s marked the most significant time in Brazilian film history which is referred to as cinema novo (new cinema). Directors such as Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Ruy Guerra, Anselmo Duarte, and Glauber Rocha were the forerunners of this movement by making films influenced by Italian – neorealism (Sommers 1). The films of this period were mainly low-budget films which were screen on location to utilize the natural beauty of the arid Sertão where these films took a realistic view at Brazil's social condition and portray poverty, drought and race discrimination which where beautifully highlighted in black and white and play out by non-professional actors. .
With the beginning of the military dictorship in 1964 came censorship of the films and thus and demise of cinema novo which lead to an exile of many directors of that time. In 1969, the President at that time created Embrafilme, a governmental cinema studio whose main responsibility was to develop the film industry. Due to the fact that, many directors made films that portrayed the military government in a negative light, they were censored and had the majority of sponsorship taken away from them which lead to a demised of the film industry (Duran 2). Even though the film output had been reduced significantly due to the lack of funds, filmmakers were still able to make films like Bruno Barreto's Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos (Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, 1976) and Caca Diegues's Bye Bye Brasil (1979) (Sommers 1). With the overthrown of the dictatorship the next step was the step was the dismantling of Embrafilme, which caused a limited amount of films to be released in the early 1990s.