Isabél Zuaa

Acting

Isabél Zuaa

Born 1987-04-05 · Lisbon, Portugal

Isabél Martins Zuaa Mutange (Lisbon, April 5, 1987), is a Portuguese actress and performer, winner of the Guarani Brazilian Cinema Award (2017), in the Revelation category, for her role in the film Joaquim, by Marcelo Gomes. In 2020, she was distinguished by the Gramado Film Festival with two Best Actress awards, for her performance in the feature film Um Animal Amarelo by Filipe Bragança and in the short film Deserto Estrangeiro, by Davi Pretto.

Acting credits

The Secret Agent poster
7.2

Brazil, 1977. Marcelo, a technology expert in his early 40s, is on the run. Hoping to reunite with his son, he travels to Recife during Carnival but soon realizes that the city is not the safe haven he was expecting.

The Secret Agent

2025

Foreign Desert poster
NR

A young Brazilian, who has just started working in a huge forest in Berlin, is dragged into a nightmare involving the German colonial past when he tries to find a girl lost in the woods.

Foreign Desert

2020

Projecto Global poster
5.0

Lisbon, 1980s, Rosa, a woman joins a group of young people disappointed at the post-Revolutionary Portugal. Part of a far-left clandestine armed organization, they share political views and a daily life that makes them grow closer. But their idealism collides head-on with a changing country and a large-scale police operation targeting them. Fleeing on a road with no return and no way forward, their existence is made up of bank robberies, bombs, friendships, prison, love and death. Trapped, their only choice is to keep on the run until they get arrested or killed.

Projecto Global

2026

Mupepy Munatim poster
NR

As he learns his mother died, a man who had left for France to find a job and a living is now returning to Portugal. We follow his wanderings, the places he forgot. We feel the stranger he has become in the eyes of the other people. Gone long ago, he didn't know then he would lose everything. He has now to grieve his own way.

Mupepy Munatim

2012

Good Manners poster
6.5

Clara, a lonely nurse from the outskirts of São Paulo, is hired by mysterious and wealthy Ana as the nanny for her unborn child. The two women develop a strong bond, but soon Clara discovers a terrifying secret about the child.

Good Manners

2018

Dr. Gama poster
8.0

Based on the biography of Luiz Gama, one of the most important characters in Brazilian history, a black man who used the laws and courts to free more than 500 slaves. Born of a free womb, Gama was sold into slavery at the age of 10 to pay off his father's gambling debts. Even as a slave, he became literate, studied and earned his own freedom, becoming one of the most respected lawyers of his time. An abolitionist and republican who inspired an entire country.

Dr. Gama

2021

Lilith poster
6.0

The mythological story of the first woman on Earth, who came before Eve. She is created by God to be Adam’s wife. However, Lilith does not accept a position of inferiority in relation to man, she rebels and goes to the desert. Lilith reappears as Eve’s double, eats the forbidden fruit, takes revenge on Adam, on God, and becomes the first woman to rise up against the ruling patriarchal system.

Lilith

2022

The Rehearsal poster
NR

Isa, a young artist invited to propose a project for an exhibition, sets out to stage a dramatic adaptation of ‘The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas’, a satirical 19th-century novel by Machado de Assis. The rehearsal is marred by difficulties which the viewer must interpret as being due to the fact that Isa is a woman, young, black, all of the above, or as difficulties anyone would encounter.

The Rehearsal

2019

Greice poster
9.0

Greice, a Brazilian girl studying in Lisbon, gets involved with a mysterious guy and ends up getting accused of a strange incident that occurs at the students' welcoming party, which forces her to return to her hometown to renew her residence permit. Hidden in a hotel, while preventing her mother from discovering she’s back in the country and with the help of some friends, Greice tries to find a place of comfort in the world.

Greice

2024

Knitting poster
3.0

Five brothers end up being raised by their older brother after their mother's death. One day, as adults, they receive the news that a comatose man in an ICU could be their father. In the hospital's waiting room, the brothers immerse themselves in their conflicts and memories, and through the knitting learned in childhood.

Knitting

2021

Auto da Casa poster
NR

A theatre having national as part of its name, at the top of a square, reflecting a country’s history. But which one? This is a voyage through the various narratives about D. Maria II National Theatre, forged through the intentions of the several regimes that intended to convey their own ideologies within the theatre’s mission. This is also the story of those who fought against it, opposed the institution and became part of it. How can one become heir of these stories, even if never having set foot inside.

Auto da Casa

2026

Abandonment poster
4.8

The couple Laura and Israël have a five-year-old son, Lucas. They live together but seem to have lost interest in one another's thoughts and cares. Their relationship seems headed for the rocks, and the only one who seems to still be looking for something from life is Lucas.

Abandonment

2021

Capoeira, um passo a dois poster
5.0

No synopsis available yet.

Capoeira, um passo a dois

2016

Kbela poster
6.7

Kbela is an experience of being a woman and becoming black. The film’s screenplay is based on the tale of MC K-Bela, which tells the story of a black girl, a resident of Rio’s Baixada Fluminense region, who went through a process of whitening during her life and decided to liberate herself from this, letting her natural hair grow again, getting rid of chemical interference.

Kbela

2015

Coup de Grâce poster
NR

The sunlight illuminates a couple in bed. During the day, the house loses its cozy air and turns into a temple. She changes from lover to priestess. He transforms his embarrassment into a confession.

Coup de Grâce

2022

Rain Hums a Lullaby to Pain poster
4.8

In the year 74 BC, Titus Lucretius Carus, a young man with bold ideas, tries to convince his friend Memio that moving to the city of Rome to study is a total waste of time. Years later, Lucretius returns from the capital. Trying to find a balance between his explanations of the natural world and his emotional experience of it, Lucretius lives a deep and troubled passion with his foreign wife Isa.

Rain Hums a Lullaby to Pain

2020

Malandro de Ouro poster
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Malandro de Ouro

2019

Pedro, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea poster
5.8

The story of Brazil’s first emperor, returning to Europe on board the English ship Warspite. The trip makes Pedro conquer his fears and face his life from a personal point of view. He goes back in time and relives outstanding moments of his earlier life – since his childhood, when in 1808 he arrived coming from Portugal with his family, until he left in the dead of the night, in 1831, running away from Brazil.

Pedro, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

2022

Pedra que Samba poster
NR

Rehearsal on a roda de samba, event that takes place every week at Pedra do Sal. A tour of the African Heritage circuit in the region of the old port of Rio de Janeiro. A slave's voice evokes the past. Buildings are demolished. The city never tires of reinventing itself. Remain the people. And the samba.

Pedra que Samba

2015

No artwork available
NR

A wild, tragicomic adventure that satirizes history through dueling narratives by Jules Verne and his wife Honorine, each recounting young Charles Darwin’s journey to the Galápagos — a voyage teeming with pirates, pink iguanas, and a riotous mix of chaos, discovery, and revolt.

Jealous White Men

A Yellow Animal poster
5.4

Obsessed with questions about his past, a bankrupt, white Brazilian filmmaker undertakes an epic journey from Brazil to Mozambique and Portugal. This melancholic fable mixes animation, live-action, voice-overs, genres, and continents to explore Brazil's colonial past.

A Yellow Animal

2020

Um Filme em Forma de Assim poster
4.2

Organized like a dream, structured like a musical and with texts, both spoken and sung, that lead us to unexpected, chaotic and exciting situations, which try to grasp part of what the unattainable Alexandre O'Neill left us.

Um Filme em Forma de Assim

2022

Joaquim poster
7.0

Brazil, 18th century. The colony of Portugal endures a decline in gold production. A Portuguese minority rules over a corrupt and autocratic society. Joaquim is an efficient soldier, famous for capturing gold smugglers. While waiting for his promotion to Lieutenant, he leaves for a risky mission in search of new gold mines - the only way to buy the freedom of Blackie, a slave he is in love with. Inspired by the true story of Tiradentes, the first leader of the Brazilian revolutionary movement.

Joaquim

2017

Dialogues After the End poster
4.0

Pavese considered Dialogues with Leucò his best work. Eloquent and at the same time sententious and fragile, but implausible among humanized gods, demigods, heroes, and other pagan figures of Greek mythology, who question, through the imaginary of myths, the society of contemporary man. Out of a time and a certain space, and thus, and like all myths, always current.

Dialogues After the End

2023