Roberto Santucci, the Brazilian comedy director whose own thriller sat on a shelf

Roberto Santucci

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	September 28, 1967 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Occupation	Film director
Known for	Just Another Christmas, Till Luck Do Us Part, The Beachnickers
Awards	Audience

The film Roberto Santucci cared about most finally reached a screen in a small Copacabana cinema better known for retrospectives of old classics, and it stayed there for a single week. Alucinados is a nervy thriller about a drug addict who kidnaps a woman inside her own armoured car, made for a sliver of what his comedies cost, and for years no exhibitor had wanted it. By then Santucci was the director Brazilian producers called when they needed a hit. The distance between the films his country buys from him and the one he made on his own says more about him than any box-office chart.

Santucci grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Rio de Janeiro and left for Los Angeles in his early twenties to study film at Columbia College Hollywood, adding extension courses at the University of California. His real school was the cutting room. He worked as an assistant editor on Robert Mandel’s School Ties and on Edward Zwick’s Legends of the Fall, and he likes to recall asking how long the Zwick edit would run and being told it would take whatever time the picture needed to be good. He still edits many of his own films.

Born in Rio on 28 September 1967, he shot his first feature, Olé – Um Movie Cabra da Peste, in Los Angeles in 2000 on roughly US$24,000. The next one brought him home. Bellini e a Esfinge, adapted from Tony Bellotto’s detective novel and released in 2001, used the seedy side of São Paulo as its engine, and Alucinados took the threat to the streets of Rio. Santucci has said he prefers to shoot in places he knows, and in those early genre films the cities do more work than the stars.

The turn came through comedy, and through a newspaper photograph of a woman who sold sex-shop products door to door. That image became a project first called Sex Delícia, written by Marcelo Saback and Paulo Cursino and set in Barra da Tijuca, the Rio district where Santucci lived. Released at the end of 2010 as De Pernas pro Ar, with Ingrid Guimarães as a workaholic who stumbles into the erotic-products trade, it sold more than three and a half million tickets. De Pernas pro Ar 2 passed four million within weeks of its opening at the end of 2012.

Leandro Hassum became his second engine. In Até que a Sorte nos Separe, Hassum and Danielle Winits play a couple who win the lottery and spend their way back to nothing, and the film grew into a trilogy. The two men went on to make O Candidato Honesto together, and by 2015 the website Omelete counted about 22 million tickets sold by Santucci’s comedies since 2010, with combined takings estimated at around R$300 million. When the producer Maíra Lucas offered him Loucas pra Casar, a vehicle for Guimarães, Tatá Werneck and Suzana Pires, he admitted to some doubt and relaxed only once he heard his friend Saback was writing it.

Critics have rarely shared the audience’s enthusiasm. Reviewing Até que a Sorte nos Separe, José Geraldo Couto called it a square comedy riddled with clichés in which everything is shrill, emphatic and redundant, and asked why serious producers had attached themselves to it. His reply is the test screening. He told Correio Braziliense in 2024 that his first cuts run long with every joke left in, that they are shown to large groups of ordinary viewers, never people who work in film, and that whatever fails to get a laugh is cut. In the same interview he said there had never been so much policing of humour. The films answer back too. In Os Farofeiros, a character grumbles in a cinema that Brazilian comedy is nothing but smut and swearing, and the grandmother on the screen turns around to glare at her.

The other half of the contradiction is his own ambition. In 2013, with Até que a Sorte nos Separe and De Pernas pro Ar 2 among the biggest Brazilian releases of the period, he told the Folha de S.Paulo columnist Mônica Bergamo that he did not want to go on ‘only making comedy’ and dreamed of an action film in the spirit of Cidade de Deus and Tropa de Elite. Alucinados, made for about R$300,000 with Mônica Martelli as the kidnapped woman, had won the audience prize at the first Paulínia festival and travelled to festivals as far away as Shanghai, yet it reached that Copacabana screen, the Cine Joia, only in 2015. Santucci put the delay down to having made it entirely independently and to not belonging to any circle in the business. He also blamed Cinema Novo, arguing that its legacy left Brazilian filmmakers unprepared for action and suspicious of it as an American import.

Streaming widened his reach without changing the method. For Netflix he directed Hassum twice: as a grouch who keeps waking up only on Christmas Eve, year after year, in Just Another Christmas, and as a man who flees the city after a breakdown and lands next to a samba-school drum master, played by Maurício Manfrini, in Fenced In, known in Brazil as Vizinhos. In cinemas the heavy lifting fell to Os Farofeiros, part of a partnership with the screenwriter Paulo Cursino that Santucci puts at more than twenty productions. The first film drew about 2.5 million viewers in 2018; Os Farofeiros 2 outgrossed Dune: Part Two at the Brazilian box office in 2024 and took the series past R$55 million. Santucci says his job is to push Cursino’s joke-packed scripts one notch higher with stunts and big-screen set pieces, such as the giant water-slide sequence in the sequel that he staged with a wink at Saving Private Ryan.

The next test arrives on 5 November 2026, when Os Farofeiros 3 opens exclusively in Brazilian cinemas through Downtown Filmes. Antônio Fragoso, Cacau Protásio, Danielle Winits and the rest of the gang fly to San Martinez, a fictional Caribbean island, for a wedding whose free trip turns out to include the cheapest hotel in Latin America. Behind it waits Picaretas Não Vão Pro Céu, already shot, with Manfrini and the comedian Tirullipa as two con men hiding out as a newly arrived priest and his altar boy. Neither is the thriller he keeps describing in interviews. Both will be measured in tickets, the only currency that has ever bought Santucci a film, and he has yet to spend any of it on the thriller.

Tags: Leandro Hassum, Brazilian cinema, Fenced In, Roberto Santucci, De Pernas pro Ar, Ingrid Guimarães

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