Brazilian cinema keeps being abolished and restarted by whoever is in government. Cinema Novo answered a hungry country with a deliberately rough camera in the early sixties and lost its argument to the censors after 1968; the state company that replaced it was abolished overnight in 1990 and took the industry down with it. What came back after 1995 is the version most of the world has seen — a favela shot like a thriller, a road film about a woman who writes letters for the illiterate, and eventually the first Brazilian film to win an Academy Award.