Adriana
Peliano
(Generated by Adriana Peliano)
The
movie Alice dos Anjos (2021, 76 minutes), directed by Daniel Leite
Almeida, takes inspiration from Carroll's Alice to create a distinctly
Brazilian narrative set in the sertão (the arid interior of northeastern
Brazil), where dreams collide with drought and migrants confront powerful
landowners. This Alice emerges not as an adaptation of the Victorian tale, but
as an independent work that reimagines the concept of a journey through an
alternative world. The film received six awards at the Brasília Film Festival,
including Best Direction, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup,
Best Film by Popular Jury and Best Film by Special Jury, and traveled to
festivals in Brazil and abroad.
On
Thursday, September 25, 2025, I was invited to give a lecture about Alice's
history in Brazil during the film's screening at the FLIConquista (Film
Festival in Vitória da Conquista), Bahia. There I learned that the film would
become an object of academic study and be included in the state's college
entrance exams. The auditorium was packed with students who knew the original
Alice and were preparing for these exams, eager to understand how Carroll's
Victorian tale had served as a point of departure for this Brazilian cinematic
experience.
These
were the seven Alicinations that I organized as categories to think about and
present Alice in Brazil during my lecture: the Creative Estrangement, the
Collage Metamorphosis, the Carnivalesque Anthropophagy, Popular Culture
appropriation, the Metalinguistic Game, Tropical Nexialism, and Collective
Oneiric Resistance. Each served as a key to show how the character was
reinvented in our cultural, artistic, and political context.
Alice's Brazilian Journey: A Tradition of Creative
Reappropriation
In
Brazil, Alice was never confined to the manners of a proper Victorian girl. In
the 1930s, writer Monteiro Lobato published books in his Sítio do Picapau
Amarelo (yellow woodpecker ranch) series for children, where Alice appeared
as a visitor. There she became a traveler through hybrid geographies where
Wonderland mixed with Neverland, the Thousand and One Nights, Brazilian
folklore, and many other literary and media realms. At the ranch she met Popeye
and Captain Hook, sucked tropical fruits straight from the tree, and even asked
for recipes for homemade cakes. The rebellious rag doll Emília treated Alice as
if she were already fluent in Portuguese, signaling how translation itself was
an act of cultural reinvention.
This
playful encounter dialogues with what the Brazilian Modernist movement
theorized in the 1920s through Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto Antropófago
(Anthropophagite Manifesto). The manifesto proposed antropofagia, a
metaphorical cultural "devouring" in which foreign influences are
consumed, digested, and transformed into something uniquely Brazilian. Through
this process, Brazil could generate new forms of art and thought deeply rooted
in its own soil. This approach has since evolved into rich practices of
dialogue, research, and creative reappropriation that continue to shape how
Brazilian artists engage with global culture.
Over
the decades, Alice has assumed new forms in tropical wonderlands. In the 1960s,
Darcy Penteado fragmented wonderland into kaleidoscopic collages that played
with pop culture and experimental visual language. In the 1990s, carnival
designer Joãosinho Trinta transformed Alice into a spectacle of resistance when
Jorge Lafond, a Black and queer performer, embodied her in Beija-Flor's
carnival parade in Rio. The performance shone not only as a manifesto against
racial and sexual prejudice, but also as part of a broader social critique,
denouncing poverty, exposing political corruption, and challenging
inequalities. Artist Jô Oliveira later illustrated a book (São Paulo: Editora
Ática, 1997) inspired by the rustic engravings of cordel literature,
(original folk literature sold as pamphlets), giving Alice a new graphic
language that connected her to northeastern popular aesthetics. Each
incarnation pulled her further from Oxford and deeper into Brazil's inventive
labyrinth.
It
is within this long tradition of cultural transformation that Alice dos Anjos should be understood. By
placing three generations of northeastern Black women: Alice, her mother, and
her grandmother, at its center, and by replacing Carroll's caterpillar with an
enigmatic pajé of the Tupinambá people, the film participates in a Brazilian
artistic lineage that reimagines foreign cultural forms through local histories
and voices. From Lobato and the Modernists to carnival and beyond, Brazilian
culture has consistently privileged reinvention and the perspectives of the
marginalized as central to its identity.
Daniel
Leite Almeida’s film adapts the motif of a girl’s journey through an altered
world but grounds it in Brazil’s realities. Carroll’s figures are reimagined
through regional imagination: the white rabbit becomes a black goat, the
contemplative caterpillar an enigmatic pajé, and the Queen of Hearts unfolds in
the colonel’s wife, who repeats “off with their heads,” and in the cangaço
queen, symbol of resistance in the northeastern sertão. At the heart of the
story are Alice, her mother, and her grandmother, a militant teacher who dreams
of equality. Their intertwined voices of ancestry, survival, and pedagogy
transform Carroll’s inspiration into a tale deeply rooted in Brazilian culture.
Brazilian Literary Traditions: Manoel de Barros and
Regional Voices
One
of the film's most striking foundations emerges through its incorporation of
Manoel de Barros, one of Brazil's greatest poets. The landscape is inhabited by
the boy who tries to hold water in a sieve, a poetic character from Barros's
work whose impossible task creates its own logic.
While
both Carroll and Barros explore alternative forms of knowledge, they do so from
different cultural contexts. Barros fabricates verbal and poetic inutensílios
"useless-tensils" like the sieve for carrying water or the buckle for
fastening silences, which emerge from regional Brazilian speech, popular
wisdom, and resistance to instrumental reason.
In
Alice's encounters with the reimagined figures (the pajé, the Severinos,
the cangaceira) the film invokes not only Manoel de Barros but also João
Cabral de Melo Neto, whose long poem Morte e Vida Severina (Death and
Life of a Severino) narrated the desperate migrations of northeastern workers.
The film's Severinos, poor migrants struggling against landowning elites over
the construction of a hydroelectric dam, echo Cabral's portrait of inequality
and survival in the sertão. This literary foundation demonstrates the
film's free dialogue with Carroll: it doesn't adapt Victorian nonsense; it
creates a distinctly Brazilian narrative voice.
Landscape as Character: The Sertão and Social Struggle
The
landscape itself becomes the film's primary terrain of meaning. The sertão,
the arid interior of northeastern Brazil, has long functioned in Brazilian
culture as a territory of trial, resilience and social conflict. This is not a
translation of Wonderland but an entirely different symbolic geography with its
own cultural weight.
The
struggle between the Severinos and the local coronéis (landowning
elites) over the dam becomes the film's central conflict, grounded in Brazil's
actual history of land disputes and class struggle. The film invokes Paulo
Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, positioning Alice's grandmother as a
Freirean educator who teaches through dialogue and critical questioning,
encouraging Alice to read the world around her and understand the power
structures that shape it. The film makes explicit reference to Angicos, the
city where Freire conducted his revolutionary literacy experiment. Even
Orwell's pigs from Animal Farm make an appearance, their critique of
corrupted revolution finding new resonance in Brazilian political reality.
The
film's visual language evokes the paintings of Tarsila do Amaral and Cândido
Portinari, who gave Brazilian modernism its grammar of social struggle, while
its soundtrack speaks in a deeply Brazilian musical idiom.
From Inspiration to Independent Creation
Alice
dos Anjos raises important questions about the
nature of creative inspiration and cultural transformation. Rather than
adapting Carroll's text, the film uses the Alice figure as a starting point to
create a new work rooted in Brazilian literature, history, and social concerns.
The
film demonstrates that a character can migrate across cultures and become
something new, reimagined through local traditions, aesthetics, and political
urgencies. This is neither adaptation nor simple appropriation, but cultural
dialogue in practice: the devouring and transformation of foreign influence
into something authentically local.
The
film's reception reveals its success as an independent work. In Brazil, critics
recognized its visual poetry and social consciousness. The six awards at the
Brasília Film Festival suggest that the film resonates as a distinctly
Brazilian achievement. International festival circuits embraced the work not as
a Carroll adaptation but as an example of how global cultural references can
spark entirely new creations rooted in local traditions.
Looking Forward
At
the film's end, Alice reads Through the Looking-Glass, signaling that
this work is the first chapter of a planned trilogy, with the next two films
already in the editing phase. For scholars of cultural studies and Brazilian
cinema, Alice dos Anjos demonstrates how international literary figures
can serve as catalysts for original works when reimagined through distinct
cultural lenses.
By
reading Alice through Manoel de Barros and João Cabral, through Paulo Freire's
pedagogies and the aesthetics of Brazilian modernism, the film creates
something new: an independent work that stands on its own artistic and
political merits.
Alberto
Manguel once said that Alice is an infinite book, useful for discussing almost
any question. In the debate after the screening in Vitória da Conquista, Daniel
Leite Almeida stated that the film consciously drew on decolonial references.
To watch this film is to realize that Wonderland is not one, but many, and that
in Brazil, Alice becomes a kaleidoscope of voices rooted in both literary
tradition and local invention. The film demonstrates that some narratives carry
within themselves the power to traverse impossible worlds not because they are
universal, but precisely because their openness allows each culture to inscribe
upon them its own urgencies, memories, and dreams of transformation.

Collage by Adriana Peliano
weaving Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, Manoel de Barros’s poetry, Orwell’s rebellious
pig, and an Alice reimagined through Tarsila do Amaral’s Abaporu.