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.
