IT IS impossible to separate the profound progressive quality of the Brazilian film industry today from Brazil’s general high standards in all its arts: Painting, sculpture, music, literature, architecture, theatre, fashion, and design, this nation has steadily achieved since the 1920s.
By the 1940s, Brazil had become one of the world’s most advanced nations in contemporary art in those genres listed above. But this may not be common knowledge to many (in comparison to general knowledge of contemporary European and North American art), for the simple reason that Brazil’s Portuguese language isolates it from the mainstream familiarity of English or French, or even Spanish, which command large populations across the globe today.
Brazilians, on the other hand, do not miss the rest of the world that much because its almost 200 million citizens comprise a huge segment derived from the world over and its races.

Brazilian cosmopolitanism

This, then, is one of the greatest boosts both to its economy and its artists who possess such a huge potential consumer audience nationally; an audience which is educationally fed by a corresponding enormous supply of high-quality art galleries and museums, periodicals and journals on diverse subjects, especially the arts, publishing houses, recording studios, architectural firms, film studios and numerous cinemas.
This practical cultural foundation is the socially constructive background which has added to the growth of Brazilian cinema today, and is a motivationally accessible social pleasure aiding a constructive Brazilian economy. However, despite this strong national self-interest, Brazilian art (visual, musical, architectural, and cinematic) is far from unknown to  leading international professionals and their quality audiences who pay attention to international modern culture.
For example, over the past six decades, Brazilian visual art has not only been exposed in the best art museums of the USA, Canada, and Europe, but its original musical styles of Samba and Bossa Nova jazz even more so, due to both its exemplary calm, peaceful festive sensitivity and structural rhythms which converted listeners and leading jazz musicians who accepted Brazilian musicians into their North American and European studios in collaboration, and often journeyed to Brazil to be in touch with the origin of this music they love.

Origin of Brazilian modernity

There is an historical social reason for such Brazilian cosmopolitanism and hospitality. Like most Latin American countries, Brazil’s modern economic and cultural development, which is parallel to similar development in Europe and surpasses them in some areas (even though rural and urban underdevelopment and social inequalities persist) exists because European colonizers of Native Indian and Africans were not evicted upon post-colonial independence, but contributed as creolized citizens and statesmen and women.
Along with this, millions of more new skilled European immigrants after the two world wars were encouraged and allowed to emigrate to Brazil, as well as huge numbers of Japanese, Middle-Eastern, and other international immigrants. Indeed, these foreigners acted as a buffer between any ethnic-political rivalry and social competition between the original non-western pure and mixed races who remained the majority of Brazil’s and South America’s population.
Standards of skilled labour and modern education therefore became the aspirant and accepted goal in which all were equalized.

Role of constructivist art

Despite the obvious existence of diverse styles of art by diverse Brazilians, it is modern constructivist contemporary Brazilian painting, sculpture, and architecture which formulated and designed progressive social lifestyles internally, and inspired attentive Brazilian professionals and ordinary citizens who contemplated and interacted with these works in ministerial, corporate, and public spaces across Brazil.
Brazil’s famous Modern Art Week in the early 1920s in Sao Paulo, and its 1950s inauguration of one of the leading international art fairs, the Sao Paulo Biennial, spearheaded a revolution in Brazil’s national creative consciousness which beautified the inner and outer nature of the country, and its aware citizens.
The root development of Brazilian constructivist abstract art is based on the structural designs of its Native Indian, African, and European Baroque artifacts, rather than the folkloric and figurative influences from other antique crafts by these cultural ethnicities.
This focus on this often ignored intelligent local constructive element in original South American pottery, utensils, Baroque religious architecture etc, combined with the constructivist modern art tradition developed since the early 20th Century (and influenced by some of these same non-Western cultures) by Braque and Picasso’s Cubist and Constructivist periods, The Russian Avant-garde (Malevich, Popova, El Lizitsky, etc), Max Bill from Switzerland, Mondrian from Holland, Samson Flexor from France, Piero Dorazio, Achille Perilli, Enzo Mari and Toti Scialoja from Italy, Ben Nicholson from England, and Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Richard Diebenkorn from The USA, along with many others.
The works of Brazil’s beautiful constructivist abstract artists, such as Lazar Segal, Antonio Gomide, Cicero Dias, Ivan Serpa, Hercules Barzotti, Ruben Valentim, Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticia and a dozen others were acquired and advanced constructively in the most awe-inspiring imaginative and innovative public architecture the world has ever seen. 
Such buildings were designed and built by Oscar Niemeyer, Lucio Costa, Fabio Penteado, Maricio  Roberto, and others. Niemeyer’s colossal constructivist sensual architecture, some based on a giant tropical lizard’s skeleton, Lotus and Sunflower forms, a woman’s curves, Afro-Brazilian dance movements, etc, made Brazil one of the most creatively original nations in the world today, its people continually inspired intellectually, and motivated to self-respect, along with similar motivation, by such daily sights, as well as their participation in engaging constructivist painting and public architecture. It is such a creative foundation to which Brazilian cinema today is indebted.