ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two phenomena connected to box-office success in the domestic film market: popular comedies and films aimed at particular religious groups. It focuses on the performance of Brazilian films on the global film circuit, and in particular the film festival circuit. Many are what could be described as being positioned at the more conventionally narrated end of non-commercial film production: the kind of films that, unlike the globochanchadas, receive positive reviews and often screen at film festivals at home and abroad. The chanchada films were widely disparaged and largely omitted from the Brazilian film canon, at least until Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes, and later Robert Stam and Joao Luiz Vieira, underlined their importance for understanding both audience taste and the socio-political context of urban Brazil in the first half of the twentieth century. Globo Filmes has a vested interest in all other religion-inspired blockbuster films in the twenty-first century.
