Marcélia Cartaxo

Acting

Marcélia Cartaxo

Born

1963-10-27 (62)

Place of birth

Cajazeiras, Paraíba, Brazil

Known for

Acting

Credits

66 titles

Marcélia de Souza Cartaxo (Cajazeiras, October 27, 1963) is a Brazilian actress and director, who gained notoriety in the film A Hora da Estrela, based on the novel by Clarice Lispector. She has won several awards in her career, including two Grande Otelo awards, three Guarani Awards, a Kikito from the Gramado Festival, four Candango Trophies from the Brasília Festival, as well as the Silver Bear for best actress at the Berlin Film Festival.

Known for

Film credits

2020s · 10 titles

State of Fear poster
5.8

As São Paulo erupts in an unprecedented wave of violence, a lawyer with underworld ties must strike a deal with the police to rescue her kidnapped niece.

State of Fear

2026

Candango: Memoirs from a Festival poster
5.0

In 1965, a year after the military coup in Brazil, an oasis of freedom opened in the country's capital. The Brasília Film Festival: a landmark of cultural and political resistance. Its story is that of Brazilian cinema itself.

Candango: Memoirs from a Festival

2020

Helen poster
9.5

Helen lives in a cortiço with her grandmother, Mrs. Graça, who supports the family with informal jobs, such as selling skewers. Still very naive, her biggest concern is buying her grandmother a birthday present: a makeup kit. The girl is going to bend over backwards to get the money and her search will reveal the daily life of those living in tenements, outlining a collective story from the network of relations that the girl establishes.

Helen

2020

A Praia do Fim do Mundo poster
10.0

Young Alice lives with her mother Helena in Ciarema, in a house facing the sea. The residence suffers from the advance of the sea levels. The daughter, an environmentalist, plans to move elsewhere, but the mother wants to stay in town. They need to find a solution together.

A Praia do Fim do Mundo

2021

She Who Lives Upstairs poster
6.0

Luzia consumes all the sweets from the neighboring baker, Carmen. Friendship evolves into a platonic passion, which brings a new flavor to Luzia's bitter days.

She Who Lives Upstairs

2020

Umbilina e Sua Grande Rival poster
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Umbilina e Sua Grande Rival

2024

The Mother poster
8.5

A street vendor who lives in the outskirts of São Paulo returns home at night and does not find her teenager son. After a nonstop search, she finds out the boy was killed by the police and his body is missing. This is the beginning of this woman’s vertiginous fight for the right to bury her son, a fight that will not only unveil the excessive violence of one of most lethal police forces of the world, but also how structural is racism in Brazilian society.

The Mother

2022

Batalha de Flores poster
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Batalha de Flores

2024

Gravidade poster
NR

In an ancient family mansion, mother Sydia and daughter Nina spend a tense night of isolation just as a solar storm threatens to collapse the Earth’s gravity. What begins as a fraught domestic moment quickly shifts when a mysterious visitor, Lara, arrives, and the house’s long‑missing employee, Joana, returns with disturbing news from the outside world. As the cosmic and terrestrial crises gather, the four women are forced to face buried secrets, generational trauma and shifting power dynamics. Their physical refuge becomes a battleground of psychological and symbolic upheaval, where the end of the world becomes mirror to the end of the old order — and perhaps the beginning of something new.

Gravidade

2025

Lispectorante poster
8.5

Glória Hartman, a mature woman going through an existential and financial crisis, returns to her hometown, which is undergoing a process of abandonment. Through a crack in the ruins of where the writer Clarice Lispector once lived, Glória begins to see fantastic scenes that will change her life.

Lispectorante

2025

2010s · 15 titles

Familiar Environment poster
NR

There are many ways to overcome the losses and drop-outs of childhood. Three boys reinvent the concept of family to face the traumas of their lives.

Familiar Environment

2019

Nova Iorque poster
NR

Hermila and Leandro want to escape. Hermila and Leandro want to stay.

Nova Iorque

2017

The History of Eternity poster
7.7

In a small village in the hinterland, three stories of love and desire are changing the emotional landscape of its residents. Characters of a romanesque world in which their conceptions of life are limited on one side by human instincts, on the other by a blind and fatalist fate.

The History of Eternity

2014

Pacarrete poster
7.8

Russas, a small town in northeastern Brazil, is the home of Pacarrete, a grumpy retired dance teacher who dreams of getting a big shot and starring at a dance spectacle for the whole town to see. She's close to fulfilling that dream, but not without overcoming a few impediments along the way.

Pacarrete

2019

A Ética das Hienas poster
NR

A fraud in a labor cause is discovered, but nothing like a good deal in Brazil. With Justice, with the market, with everything.

A Ética das Hienas

2019

Agreste poster
6.0

Drylands could be anywhere, just as Marcélia Cartaxo could be many women (including herself). The actress is placed in a situation in which she encounters nature and other female figures, in some instances, her doubles. Out of these encounters spring other possibilities that operate in the world of representation, which, in the film originate from the same imaginary power as children's games in empty lots.

Agreste

2010

Moído poster
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Moído

2015

No artwork available
NR

Inspired by an novel by Graciliano Ramos, Alexandre e Outros Heróis is a beautiful way to celebrate his 60th year of death. The story of a man, his life and his death in the Brazil's backwoods.

Alexandre e Outros Heróis

2013

O Seu Amor de Volta (Mesmo que ele não queira) poster
5.0

The comic docu-drama that follows four characters who share their stories (real and imagined) about frustrated love, addressing the most diverse superstitions and rituals performed in search of success in love. To delve into the nature of the accounts, fortune tellers, pais de santo, mums-de-santo, and seers are consulted to predict futures, give advice, and explain why people are obsessed with loving and being loved.

O Seu Amor de Volta (Mesmo que ele não queira)

2019

Coconut Sweet poster
5.5

Diana's family produces coconut sweets. João gathers the coconut and Diana and Lucia make the sweets. Zacarias sells product in the city. One day, Diana goes to the river with her mother and her aunt Maria.

Coconut Sweet

2010

Faixa de Gaza poster
NR

In a housing complex on the outskirts, Mago heads a band of young people enticing and committing crimes amid a war of factions reported by the radio waves. Nazaré and Naldin are faced with the violence of this conflict, as both are in the wrong place: the gaza strip.

Faixa de Gaza

2019

Acqua Movie poster
5.9

A documentarist is convinced by her son to travel to Brazil's Northeast so she can throw his dad ashes at São Francisco river.

Acqua Movie

2019

Big Jet poster
4.7

The boy Francisco spent his days accompanying his father at work, or rather, on the roads. The man is a driver of the imposing Big Jet, a pickup truck used to clean the city's cesspools without basic sanitation. But the boy is more interested in the ideas of his uncle, a libertarian and anarchist artist. As he discovers his first love, Chico realizes the vocation to become a poet.

Big Jet

2015

Trampolim do Forte poster
6.0

No synopsis available yet.

Trampolim do Forte

2013

New Amsterdam poster
9.5

The arrival of the West Indian Companies to Natal in the XVII century is just the beginning of this violent story that pushes Bernarda and her family to run away from the city and from the invasion. In the Potengi Mill she meets the foreman's son Rafael and they immediately discover a passionate love. It will give them the force to try to survive during those violent years triggered by Jacob Rabbí, a German assigned by Prince John Maurice of Nassau to command the conquest.

New Amsterdam

2017

2000s · 11 titles

Madame Satã poster
6.9

In the favelas of Rio de Janeiro of the 1930s, João Francisco dos Santos is several things — son of slaves, ex-convict, thug, homosexual and adopted father for a number of pariahs. João expresses himself on the stage of a cabaret as Madame Satã.

Madame Satã

2002

Love for Sale poster
7.3

In northern Brazil, Hermila patiently waits for her husband. However, he has abandoned her. Sexy, restless and resolute, she raffles off "a night in paradise" with herself. This beautifully-shot portrait doesn't shy away from the burdens of a young scarred woman, but it also celebrates her courage to live according to her own rules.

Love for Sale

2006

Bog of Beasts poster
6.0

A man falls in love with a teenage girl, who is exploited by her own grandfather, who sometimes takes her to a gas station to show her naked to whomever pays him some money.

Bog of Beasts

2006

What Is It Worth? poster
6.6

Free adaptation of Machado de Assis's short story "Pai Contra Mãe", having some of Nireu Cavalcanti's 18th Century chronicles as inspiration, the film traces parallels between life in during the slavery period and in modern Brazil.

What Is It Worth?

2005

O Sonho de Inacim poster
NR

No synopsis available yet.

O Sonho de Inacim

2009

Amélia poster
8.6

Fictional story based on Sarah Bernhard's visit to Brazil in 1905. The actress, experiencing a personal and professional crisis at the time, is induced by her personal Brazilian maid, Amélia, to make a performance in Rio de Janeiro. After arriving, she is forced to stand the company of Amélia's exotic sisters.

Amélia

2000

Wrath Time poster
7.7

No synopsis available yet.

Wrath Time

2003

The Invisible Friend poster
NR

No synopsis available yet.

The Invisible Friend

2006

Baptism of Blood poster
7.4

In São Paulo, in the late 1960s, the convent of the Dominican friars became a trench of resistance to the military dictatorship that governs Brazil. Moved by Christian ideals, frets Betto, Oswaldo, Fernando, Ivo and Tito came to support the guerrilla group Ação Libertadora Nacional, commanded by Carlos Marighella.

Baptism of Blood

2007

Delicate Crime poster
5.4

Antônio Martins, respected theatrical critic, is a very rational man. But a chance meeting with young Inês, a nude painting model, is going to rock him. Inês keeps a relationship with painter José Torres Campana, an older man with a deep influence over her. Antônio gets jealous, and the three become characters of a drama saturated with desire and danger.

Delicate Crime

2005

No artwork available
NR

A series of conversations between a detective and an imprisoned artist accused of murdering one of his former mates.

O Caso Morel

2006

1990s · 7 titles

Celebração - 100 Anos do Cinema Nacional poster
NR

"Portraits and excerpts from Brazilian films from all times. Actors, directors and images that affirm cinema."

Celebração - 100 Anos do Cinema Nacional

1997

The Patriot poster
5.3

Policarpo is a chauvinistic patriot, a major who tries to find solutions for Brazilian problems using only the resources of his own country. His visionary and idealistic temperament is behind his strange ideas about how to build a great nation.

The Patriot

1998

For All - O Trampolim da Vitória poster
5.6

1943, World War II. The northeastern coast of Brazil is an strategic region for the Allies. Giancarlo, an Italian immigrant married to a Brazilian woman, lives nearby the Parnamirin Field, the largest military base built by the USA outside of their territory. In this new base, Brazilian recruits who speak English suddenly find themselves reaching privileged positions.

For All - O Trampolim da Vitória

1998

Dente Por Dente poster
4.0

No synopsis available yet.

Dente Por Dente

1994

A Árvore de Marcação poster
10.0

No synopsis available yet.

A Árvore de Marcação

1994

Cesium-137 poster
5.9

In 1987, in Goiânia, two paper collectors find a radioactive capsule and sell it to the owner of a junkyard. Once the capsule is opened, more than 250 people end up contaminated by the substance called Cesium 137, being the biggest radiological accident in the history of Brazil.

Cesium-137

1990

Sixteen-Oh-Sixty poster
6.3

Rich executive being threatened by a burglar who had been caught trying to steal his mansion hires a hitman to kill him in prison. But another man is killed instead, leaving a widow and three kids. Full of remorse, he tries to help the family, taking everyone home. Soon, conflicts arise from the impossible coexistence of such contrasting families under the same roof.

Sixteen-Oh-Sixty

1995

1980s · 5 titles

Series credits

Большая засада poster
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Большая засада

1995

A História de Ana Raio e Zé Trovão poster
9.0

No synopsis available yet.

A História de Ana Raio e Zé Trovão

1990

Mandacaru poster
8.0

No synopsis available yet.

Mandacaru

1997

Forbidden Desire poster
6.5

In the 1930s, in Passaperto, the powerful Cândida controls the family until the arrival of Laura, considered a miracle, who awakens passions and rivalries that will change everyone's destinies.

Forbidden Desire

2007

Old River poster
7.9

A great love story, a family rivalry that spans generations: the telenovela narrates the love for the São Francisco River, which is revealed in the feelings between Maria Tereza and Santo.

Old River

2016

Amazônia poster
4.4

No synopsis available yet.

Amazônia

1991

O País do Cinema poster
NR

No synopsis available yet.

O País do Cinema

2016

Cangaço Novo poster
7.7

Adrift and desperately needing money to pay for his ailing adoptive father's care, Ubaldo, a bank clerk who's unable to remember his childhood, receives an inheritance that will change his destiny for good. He goes to Cratará, in the heart of the northwest desert, where he'll become the leader of a pack of ruthless bandits, fulfilling the legacy of his biological father - a mythical cangaceiro.

Cangaço Novo

2023

Cangaço Novo poster
7.7

Adrift and desperately needing money to pay for his ailing adoptive father's care, Ubaldo, a bank clerk who's unable to remember his childhood, receives an inheritance that will change his destiny for good. He goes to Cratará, in the heart of the northwest desert, where he'll become the leader of a pack of ruthless bandits, fulfilling the legacy of his biological father - a mythical cangaceiro.

Cangaço Novo

2023

Guerreiros do Sol poster
8.5

The story of two country folk, Josué and Rosa, and how they meet to become one of the most famous cangaceiro couples of all time.

Guerreiros do Sol

2025

No artwork available
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Guerra Sem Fim

1993

O Canto da Sereia poster
7.5

Meet Sereia, a young and beautiful singer whose world of fame and fortune is interlaced with envy and hate. Her murder in the midst of carnival shocks the entire country and the hunt for her killer reveals a new suspect with each new day of investigation. Holding the status of a big-budget thriller, the miniseries brings about mysticism, sensuality and suspense that hooks the viewer until the astonishing end.

O Canto da Sereia

2013

Stone of the Kingdom poster
NR

Death Caetana, the terrible ounce winged, flying over the hinterland where a circus troupe led by an old clown comes to a village. The old clown open a thick book and begins the representation of an enigmatic novel, heroic and memorialistic: The Stone of the Kingdom. The clown is Pedro Dinis Quaderna, the protagonist of the novel, already aged, and the representation of the content will be his own memories. The old clown recalls the moment, "arrested and prematurely aged by suffering , after 41 years" wrote the novel in the public chain Taperoá.

Stone of the Kingdom

2007

World’s End poster
5.5

Vitória and her son, Cristiano come back to their hometown Desterro, running away from a troubled life in the city. She asks her brother Balbino for shelter. The arrival of mother and son brings the town’s secrets and forgotten stories back to light, in strange, mysterious ways. Cristiano’s journey of self-discovery through the town’s ghostly entrails sets him in a collision course with the most powerful man in town: his uncle.

World’s End

2016

Behind the camera