Eduardo and Monica

A party in Brasília. Eduardo is eighteen, Mônica is nearly thirty, and they have nothing in common: he is a schoolboy who wants to study medicine, she is a vet, a painter, politically active. The film is about how the two of them carry that gap across years. René Sampaio directs, with Gabriel Leone as Eduardo and Alice Braga as Mônica. The source is not a novel or a life. It is a song: Eduardo e Mônica, written by Renato Russo for Legião Urbana, a track most Brazilians can recite. It tells an entire relationship in five minutes. The film opens those five minutes into two hours and stages the lyrics as scenes. Sampaio had done this before. His 2013 film Faroeste Caboclo was adapted from another Legião Urbana song. It premiered at the Miami International Film Festival on 8 March 2020, then had its Brazilian release pushed back twice by the pandemic and finally opened on 20 January 2022. It was nominated for adapted screenplay at the Grande Prêmio do Cinema Brasileiro. Who it is for: anyone drawn to 1980s Brasília, to Brazilian rock, or to love stories built across a generational gap. Who it is not for: if you do not know the song, the film never explains why certain moments pause the way they do. They will read as scenes and nothing more.