He also produced a film on Brazil's colonial history with How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, a 16th-century tale of a captured French colonialist who is integrating into a tribe of Brazil's Tupinamba Indians until the chief begins to wonder if he would make a tastier meal than the Portuguese captives who preceded him. Cinema novo films found some acceptance among Brazil's students and its middle class in the 1960s and 70s, Dos Santos said, but the movement achieved even more recognition when French and American film critics began praising its films. For example, in 1984, Memories of Prison, Dos Santos' three-hour epic recounting the horrors of political prisoners under Brazil's military dictatorship, was seen by 2 million Brazilians. Dos Santos said with the work of cinema novo done, The Third Bank of the River and his other recent films have moved toward allegorical settings and magical realism. We don't need that movement.
Filmmakers are now free to find their own ways.