As Boas Maneiras (Good Manners)

• Brazil/France co-production directed by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra; it premiered at the 70th Locarno International Film Festival on August 6, 2017 and took the Special Jury Prize, the competition's second-highest honor behind the Golden Leopard.
• The whole thing grew from a nightmare of Dutra's: two women living in an isolated house raising a strange, monstrous baby. He told the dream to Rojas, and the two dug into werewolf folklore, where the myth keeps circling impulses of violence and sex and the conservative, religious values that try to cage them.
• The grown child werewolf Joel is a digital creation by French studio Mikros Image. Child actor Miguel Lobo performed every CGI shot in special green clothes so the creature kept the intensity of his real acting; a separate animatronic was built for the newborn-pup version. As the directors put it, keeping Lobo's performance alive in the final CGI character 'demanded a lot of work and care from the French Mikros Image team.'
• Runs a deliberate 135 minutes split into two near-equal halves divided by a seven-year time jump, an act break severe enough that the film effectively restarts its story mid-stream, with Caetano Gotardo credited as editor across both parts.
• Cinematographer Rui Poças shot a heightened, almost storybook São Paulo, with the directors openly presenting the city as a matte painting in the opening scenes and leaning on early Disney features (Snow White 1937, Cinderella 1950, Sleeping Beauty 1959) for how color and music carry the tone shifts between musical, romance, and horror.
• Despite the festival haul (96% on Rotten Tomatoes), its theatrical take was tiny, roughly $35,700 worldwide; Imovision released it in Brazil on June 7, 2018, after a France bow (Jour2Fête) on March 21, 2018.

The werewolf is the literalized child of a relationship Brazilian society won't permit. Ana's pregnancy comes from a one-night stand she can't fully name, and the monster she births lands in the arms of Clara, the Black working-class woman the wealthy family discards. Joel's monthly transformation reads as the body forcing out what polite society buried: a mixed, queer-coded household that the fairy-tale frame keeps insisting shouldn't exist, yet does.

Read the two halves as the same horror told from opposite class positions. Part one is the rich woman's gothic, the help arriving to a beautiful apartment where something is wrong. Part two is the servant's reality, where the wrong thing is now her son and the city she actually lives in. The brutal mid-film time jump isn't a twist so much as a switch in who the camera believes, demoting the wealthy perspective the genre usually centers.

Clara's chains and lullabies are the film's real argument about parenting a difference you can't fix. Every full-moon ritual, the restraints, the lies to teachers and neighbors, mirrors raising a child whose nature the world has already decided is dangerous. The tragedy isn't that Joel is a monster; it's that love alone can't out-argue a society organized to hunt him.

Clara, a broke Black nurse from São Paulo's outskirts, takes a live-in job for Ana, a rich pregnant white woman who sleepwalks under the full moon and craves raw meat. Their bond turns tender, then sexual, then bloody once the thing Ana's carrying announces itself. Then the film snaps its own neck: a seven-year jump leaves Clara raising the orphaned, furred boy Joel as her son, chaining him to the bed on full-moon nights and lying to keep a small monster human. Class, race, and motherhood, dressed as a fairy tale with teeth.