Among the eight features and six shorts offered at this year’s Brazilian Film Festival of Vancouver, playing at the Vancity Theatre Wednesday through next Sunday (July 8 to 12), standouts include smart documentaries and several zippy thrillers.

Kicking off the second installment of this touring event is Verí´nica, which follows the flight of a schoolteacher after her student is stranded with valuable information sought by ruthless gangsters. The lead, popular TV star Andréa Beltrí£o, is married to the movie’s director, Maurí­cio Farias, who was scheduled to come to Vancouver for the fest. Instead, we’ll get a visit from Bruno Barreto, with his latest creation, Last Stop 174, a fictional re-creation of the 2000 hostage crisis that anchored a popular doc, Bus 174.

Perhaps the most widely known Brazilian filmmaker, Barreto made homegrown hits like Gabriela and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands and the English-language View From the Top, Carried Away, and Bossa Nova (the last two starring then-wife Amy Irving). Also on hand will be Joel Zito Araújo, maker of Cinderellas, Wolves, and One Enchanted Prince, a provocative, if repetitive, documentary on relationships between European men and Brazilian mulatas, or mixed-race women.

Music as both an evolving core to national identity and a connection to the outside world is the subject of Favela on Blast. The documentary is an excitingly crafted look at funk carioca, a favela-based musical movement that is more intriguing sociologically than aesthetically—especially given its degrading lyrics. For the good stuff, look to Enchanted Word, a heart-lifting ode to the poetry found in bossa nova and beyond.

One of the most interesting items is Smoking I Wait, about the evils of the tobacco industry and the curse of quitting cigarettes. It’s a first feature for Adriana L. Dutra, who also happens to be the director of the festival itself and will be here for the opening. For Dutra, calling the Georgia Straight from her office in Rio de Janeiro, the project was a labour-intensive way of killing the pesky habit.

“I was quitting for the fifth time,” Dutra remembers, in English, “and after doing all this research about tobacco addiction, I woke up with the whole movie in my head. You could say the movie was my medicine.”

The doc already did well enough in Brazil to be spun off into a TV miniseries and she hopes to sell it abroad in some form. Now the director is working on a drama about something rarely discussed in Brazil: violence among the wealthy.

But her main focus is still the travelling festival, which was launched in Miami in 1995 and is currently hitting 10 cities worldwide (for more, see brazilianfilmfestival.com/).

“We felt this could be a way to expose the cinema, to sell Brazil in many places and ways. The essence of a country is in its cinema, and in that way, my country is very rich.”