Bianca de Felippes is the home-country distributor of Beyond Ipanema, one of the flagship movies of the third annual Brazilian Film Festival of Vancouver. She was also one of five programmers who put together the rundown happening here July 15 to 18, at the Vancity Theatre (1181 Seymour Street).

“We watched over a hundred movies, mostly things not released yet,” she says, in translated Portuguese, in a call from her office in Rio De Janeiro. “Documentaries are particularly strong right now. There’s still some resistance among the [Brazilian] public, but that’s changing.”

This year’s lineup includes Within the River, Among the Trees, and Tamboro, both of which are built on true-life footage of modern aboriginal life, as well as the docudrama Lula, The Son of Brazil, a bio-depiction of the nation’s current president. De Filippes says the touring fest’s mandate was to give an overview of what’s currently being made. Most notable in the current batch, as detailed at is the energy of the movies themselves. Efforts like Elvis & Madona and Love Stories Last Only 90 Minutes are striking in regard to cinematography, editing, and the bold physical qualities—all undertaken with limited funds.

“Creativity on a low budget is our thing,” de Felippes says with a laugh. “There are now more degrees in filmmaking at universities, and people bring their skills from advertising and TV. But we still have the old problem that very few of these movies make it to cinemas, and they are competing with American blockbusters. The latest Twilight is at 680 out of the 2000 theatres in Brazil!”

Still, if it bites to be up against vampires, there’s an awful lot of music in Brazil—much of it highly exportable. Beyond Ipanema, subtitled Brazilian Waves in Global Music, starts at samba and bossa nova and quickly moves further afield. Most arrestingly, Dzi Croquettes documents a campy dance-and-music group from the '80s that tested a dictatorship poorly positioned to grasp the subversion inherent in gender-tweaking theatricality.

“These things travel well,” says the young insider, who will likewise be in Vancouver. “We could just do a festival on music alone, but the main thing is diversity. And that’s what you’ll see here.”