Brazil

Part of the special series THE MAGIC OF TERRY GILLIAM.

Simple bureaucrat Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) escapes the monotony of his daily life through a recurring daydream in which he sees himself as a virtuous hero rescuing a beautiful woman. While investigating a case that led to the false arrest and eventual death of an innocent man instead of wanted terrorist Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro), he meets the woman from his daydream (Kim Greist) and gets caught in a web of confusion, mindless bureaucracy and lies while trying to help her.

Terry Gilliam sometimes refers to BRAZIL as the second of his "trilogy of the imagination," which begins with TIME BANDITS (1981) and ends with THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN (1988). The three films, he said, are about the "madness of our awkwardly ordered society and the desire to escape it by any means necessary," with BRAZIL showing this desire from the point of view of a man in his midlife. Gilliam also later referred to BRAZIL as the first part of a dystopian satire trilogy he forms with 12 MONKEYS (1995) and THE ZERO THEOREM (2013) - though he later denied saying so.