
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
NRNo synopsis available yet.
Большая засада
1995
9.0No synopsis available yet.
A História de Ana Raio e Zé Trovão
1990
8.0No synopsis available yet.
Mandacaru
1997
6.5In 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
7.9A 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
4.4No synopsis available yet.
Amazônia
1991
Film credits
2020s · 10 titles
5.8As 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
5.0In 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
9.5Helen 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
10.0Young 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
NRNo synopsis available yet.
Umbilina e Sua Grande Rival
2024
6.0Luzia 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
8.5Glória 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
NRIn 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
8.5A 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
NRNo synopsis available yet.
Batalha de Flores
2024
2010s · 15 titles
NRHermila and Leandro want to escape. Hermila and Leandro want to stay.
Nova Iorque
2017
NRThere 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
6.0Drylands 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
7.7In 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
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
NRNo synopsis available yet.
Moído
2015
7.8Russas, 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
NRA 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
5.5Diana'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
5.9A 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
4.7The 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
5.0The 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
NRIn 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
6.0No synopsis available yet.
Trampolim do Forte
2013
9.5The 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
6.9In 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
7.3In 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
6.6Free 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
6.0A 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
8.6Fictional 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
NRNo synopsis available yet.
O Sonho de Inacim
2009
7.4In 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
7.7No synopsis available yet.
Wrath Time
2003
NRNo synopsis available yet.
The Invisible Friend
2006
A series of conversations between a detective and an imprisoned artist accused of murdering one of his former mates.
O Caso Morel
2006
5.4Antônio 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
1990s · 7 titles
NR"Portraits and excerpts from Brazilian films from all times. Actors, directors and images that affirm cinema."
Celebração - 100 Anos do Cinema Nacional
1997
5.3Policarpo 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
5.61943, 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
10.0No synopsis available yet.
A Árvore de Marcação
1994
5.9In 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
6.3Rich 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
4.0No synopsis available yet.
Dente Por Dente
1994
1980s · 5 titles
7.3Macabéa has just moved to the big city after her aunt, who raised her, died. She gets a job as a typist and moves into a boarding house with three other women. In her spare time, she listens to a radio station called Time; on Sundays, she likes to ride the metro. Then she meets Olímpico, a northeasterner like herself, who has dreams of becoming a congressman.
Hour of the Star
1986
6.0Rich girl travels with her fiancé (a cousin) to the family farm, where they're going to marry. But finds another cousin in love with her who does everything to hamper the wedding.
Brasa Adormecida
1986
The story of two brothers who are trying to farm in the Brazilian Amazon.
Soul's Boundary
1988
9.0Milionário and José Rico are robbed of their money and their fans' enthusiasm. But a female truck driver is out to help them.
Sonhei com Você
1988
No synopsis available yet.
Salvar o Brasil
1987
Undated · 2 titles
NRBased on real events and set in the Brazilian backlands, the script follows the journey of Carla and Luzinete, two sisters marked by a childhood of abandonment and violence, in a Brazil of dictatorship, popular religiosity and still-open social wounds.
Nossos Caminhos
—
No synopsis available yet.
Marcélia
—
Series credits
NRNo synopsis available yet.
Большая засада
1995
9.0No synopsis available yet.
A História de Ana Raio e Zé Trovão
1990
8.0No synopsis available yet.
Mandacaru
1997
6.5In 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
7.9A 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
4.4No synopsis available yet.
Amazônia
1991
NRNo synopsis available yet.
O País do Cinema
2016
7.7Adrift 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
7.7Adrift 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
8.5The 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 synopsis available yet.
Guerra Sem Fim
1993
7.5Meet 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
NRDeath 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
5.5Vitória 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

