In the history of Brazilian cinema, Eunice Gutman is rarely a household name. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1941, she studied film in Brussels and cut her teeth in European editing rooms before returning to Brazil in the 1970s. There, she carved out a space in a national cinema often dominated by men and mythmaking, becoming one of the most consistent documentary voices of feminist and social resistance. Her lens never glamorized; it bore witness.

Gutman belonged to a generation of filmmakers for whom cinema was not an aesthetic accessory but a tool of political urgency. Brazil’s military dictatorship was still tightening its grip when she began directing, and her decision to turn her camera toward literacy campaigns, favela schools, sex workers, and waste pickers was not neutral—it was defiance.

Documenting What Power Ignores

Her debut, E o mundo era muito maior que a minha casa (1976), follows adult literacy efforts in rural Rio as part of the national MOBRAL Movimento Brasileiro de Alfabetização (Brazilian Moviment of Literacy) program. On paper, MOBRAL was the state’s attempt at social progress. Gutman’s documentary strips away the bureaucracy to reveal something more vital: the hunger of ordinary people for tools to write their own lives. Where the state saw statistics, she saw individuals wrestling with words like keys to locked doors.

In A Rocinha Tem Histórias (1985), she turned her attention to one of Rio’s largest favelas. At a time when the city’s media often painted Rocinha in terms of crime and marginality, Gutman’s film looked instead at a community’s struggle for education and dignity. Children and teachers appear not as passive recipients of aid but as protagonists shaping a space of possibility within an environment marked by exclusion. The film won awards in Rio, Brasília, and Gramado, yet its deeper legacy is how it anticipated later debates about favela representation: who gets to tell the story, and from which vantage point?

Women at the Edges

Gutman’s oeuvre is threaded by one theme: women in overlooked spaces. Só no Carnaval (1982) captures the ritual of men cross-dressing during Carnaval, a festive tradition that masks—but does not erase—the rigid codes of gender outside those days of license. Mulheres, Uma Outra História (1988) and Palavra de Mulher (1999) continued this focus, amplifying women’s narratives as a counter-archive to Brazil’s patriarchal storytelling.

Perhaps her most haunting work is Amores de Rua (1994), a portrait of Rio’s red-light district told through the testimonies of sex workers. In stark interviews, women narrate not just the violence and stigma surrounding their labor, but also the forms of solidarity and agency that grow in the shadows of the city. Gutman does not speak for them; she constructs a frame in which they speak for themselves. The effect is unsettling and intimate: a mirror held up to a society eager to consume but reluctant to acknowledge the humanity of those it consumes.

Cinema as Collective Struggle

Beyond her filmography, Gutman was a builder of institutions. She co-founded the Rio Women’s Film and Video Collective, helped organize ABRACI (the Brazilian Association of Filmmakers), and served as president of the Brazilian Association of Documentarists. These were not just bureaucratic roles—they were battles for recognition in a cultural field where women were often erased.

In her later years, she continued to pursue stories of marginalized labor. Nos Caminhos do Lixo (As Catadoras de Jacutinga) (2009) turns its attention to waste pickers, women who reclaim survival from what others throw away. The metaphor is striking: in discarded materials, Gutman finds both the literal economy of the poor and the symbolic terrain of her cinema—recovering what society discards, making visible what power erases.

A Legacy of Quiet Insistence

Eunice Gutman’s films do not shout. They do not flatter. They insist, quietly but relentlessly, that lives lived in the periphery matter, and that cinema can be an instrument for rewriting social memory.

Her legacy is less about a single masterpiece than about an arc: from literacy to favelas, from Carnaval to prostitution, from women’s movements to waste pickers. Together, these works sketch a cartography of Brazilian marginality seen through a feminist eye, decades before such perspectives gained institutional traction.

Today, as Brazilian cinema continues to navigate cycles of censorship, funding crises, and resurgent authoritarianism, Gutman’s work feels prescient. She reminds us that the struggle over representation is never only about the screen—it is about whose voices become history.

If Brazilian film history has too often celebrated the grand gestures of Cinema Novo or the international acclaim of urban auteurs, Eunice Gutman’s career offers another story: a cinema of small gestures with large consequences, a camera wielded against forgetting.