Terry Gilliam’ famously fought a public battle against studio meddling over Brazil, particularly regarding an enforced happy ending. 

Heavily influenced by both Orwell’s 1984 and Kafka, the movie stars Jonathan Pryce as a low level bureaucrat, who becomes lost between his dreams and reality in a hyper-stylised city, somewhere between film noir and Lang’s Metropolis. Robert De Niro, meanwhile, plays a heating engineer who also may be an anarchist – its that kind of, hard-to-describe film!

In the European cut (spoiler alert!), Pryce ends up insane but happy in a torture chair. For US audiences, a re-edited ending where he and the girl of his dreams escape was deemed more palatable by studio executives. Gilliam was forced to take out a full page ad in Variety and show his version in private screenings, before the movie finally got released, more or less as he intended.

This is the French poster design. I have this for sale in both ‘grande’ and ‘petit’ sizes here.