Brazil (1985 film)

Brazil is a 1985 dystopian science fiction black comedy film directed by Terry Gilliam and written by Gilliam, Charles McKeown, and Tom Stoppard. A co-production between the United Kingdom and the United States, the film stars Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan, and Kim Greist. The film centres on Sam Lowry, a low-ranking bureaucrat trying to find a woman who appears in his dreams while he is working in a mind-numbing job and living in a small flat, set in a dystopian world in which there is an over-reliance on poorly maintained (and rather whimsical) machines and where people found guilty of crimes are liable for the costs of their interrogation by torture. Brazil's satire of technocracy, bureaucracy, hyper-surveillance, corporate statism, and state capitalism is reminiscent of George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it has been called "Kafkaesque" as well as absurdist.