New Documentary Brings Brazilian Artist Amélia Toledo Back to the Screen
A new documentary tracing the five-decade career of Brazilian artist Amélia Toledo entered cinemas across Brazil on 20 August 2026, offering audiences previously unseen footage of an artist who, according to the film's director, produced art until her last day alive.
"Amelia Toledo: Lembrar de Não Esquecer" — the subtitle translates as "Don't Forget to Remember" — runs 82 minutes and is directed by Helio Goldsztejn, whose previous films include "Aqueles Dias" and "Tomie Ohtake" Valor Globo. The film had its world premiere at the 49th Mostra Internacional de Cinema em São Paulo and opened theatrically in Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and São Paulo. It was later made available for streaming on IC Play, the streaming platform run by Itaú Cultural in São Paulo.
Toledo was born in São Paulo in 1926 and died in Cotia, in the state of São Paulo, in 2017. She studied under Anita Malfatti — the painter whose 1917 exhibition scandalised São Paulo and helped ignite Brazilian modernism — along with Yoshiya Takaoka and Waldemar da Costa, and later worked for the architect João Batista Vilanova Artigas. In the late 1950s she travelled to London, where she studied under William Turnbull at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and began making collages from torn paper The Art Newspaper.
Back in Brazil, she taught at several institutions, including the University of Brasília, founded in 1962, as well as Mackenzie and the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (Faap), both in São Paulo. After the 1964 military coup, Toledo and her husband — who also taught at the University of Brasília — left for Portugal with their children in 1965, living there for around two years before returning to Brazil.
Her work ranged from jewellery design to sculpture, and she experimented with acrylic, metal plates, stones and shells. Goldsztejn describes Toledo as a precursor of what he calls "sustainable" art, noting her use of repurposed materials and her constant experimentation with new visual languages. She lived alongside artists Hélio Oiticica and Lígia Pape, two central figures of Brazil's neoconcrete movement, which sought to merge art and lived experience in the late 1950s and 1960s.
The documentary draws on archival photographs and footage from exhibitions, workshops and interviews, and includes testimonials from friends, relatives and fellow artists — a hallmark of Goldsztejn's films. Some sections repurpose footage shot nearly a decade ago by other filmmakers for a project that was never completed, including material showing Toledo in her home and studio speaking about her practice. The film also traverses the intimacy of her atelier, which doubled as her home.
Toledo's work has received renewed attention in recent years. A 2024 exhibition at the Museu Brasileiro da Escultura e Ecologia (Mube) in São Paulo brought her practice to a new generation of viewers, and she was included in the Hammer Museum's exhibition "Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985," which opened in Los Angeles in 2017 and travelled to the Brooklyn Museum in New York and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo.
What makes the film resonate beyond the art world is its timing. Toledo died nine years ago, and her name never reached the international recognition enjoyed by some of her Brazilian contemporaries. A documentary built from rescued footage and family testimony is, in a sense, an act of provenance — the documented chain of ownership that establishes an artist's place in history. Whether it shifts that balance is a question the box office and the streaming numbers will answer.
