This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
More than sixty years after the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, O Pagador de Promessas remains the only Brazilian film to have won the festival's top prize, the Palme d'Or. The jury that awarded it, led by Japanese writer and diplomat Tetsuro Furukaki and including the French director Francois Truffaut among its eleven members, chose Anselmo Duarte's film over a competition field of 35 films that included Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse and Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel, both major works by directors already internationally established. A year later, the film became the first Brazilian and the first South American film ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
What the jury responded to, on the film's own terms, was not spectacle but an argument staged through one stubborn man's religious conscience. Ze do Burro's vow to the orisha Iansa, made openly and honored exactly as promised, is treated by the film as morally serious on its own account, not as folklore decorating a more important Catholic story. The parish priest who refuses his cross is not written as a simple villain either; the film holds both religious positions as genuinely felt rather than staging an easy victory for either side, which is very likely what separated it, in a strong field, in the eyes of a jury weighing dozens of films chasing bigger and more conventional statements. In 2015 the Brazilian Association of Film Critics ranked it the ninth greatest Brazilian film ever made, a verdict delivered by a national critical establishment more than fifty years removed from the Cannes win itself and arrived at independently of it.