In the late 1960s, a significant shift of focus occurred in Brazilian cinema from the public sphere to the private life and family dramas. In the previous decade, Brazilian cinema had primarily concerned itself with issues of labour exploitation, social movements, political history and allegories of national identity. Some Cinema Novo and post-Cinema Novo films provide compelling evidence of this change of emphasis. For example, Copacabana me engana (Copacabana Deceives Me, Antônio Carlos Fontoura, 1969) and Brasil ano 2000 (Brazil Year 2000, Walter Lima Junior, 1969) focus on moral conflicts deriving from the generation gaps dividing petit-bourgeois characters; Matou a família e foi ao cinema (Killed the Family and Went to the Movies, Júlio Bressane, 1969) displays a series of criminal acts committed by passionate characters who, despite belonging to different social classes, present similar patterns of frustration and resentment developed within the private space of the family. The degeneration of traditional households is depicted in films that thematise the close connection between social changes and family decadence, as in Os herdeiros (The Heirs, Carlos Diegues, 1969), A casa assassinada (The Murdered House, Paulo César Saraceni, 1971), Os deuses e os mortos (The Gods and the Dead, Ruy Guerra, 1970) and Os monstros de Babaloo (The Babaloo Monsters, Elyseu Visconti, 1970). Significantly, psychoanalysis comes to the foreground as an overt guiding principle in the composition of many of these dramas, to such an extent that a film like A culpa (Guilt, Domingos de Oliveira, 1971) begins with a quotation from Freud that performs the same explanatory function which, in early 1960s Cinema Novo films, was fulfilled by social commentary and historical information.

From the late 1960s onwards, the experiences of the new generations, influenced by phenomena such as sexual liberation and other new codes of behaviour fostered by the development of mass-media culture, provided an impulse for films in which the concern with private life and sexual morality became a valid means of holding political debates, which, at that time, were suppressed elsewhere by the military regime. Strongly anti-Communist, the military endeavoured to support the West in the context of the Cold War and to accelerate the country's economic growth. On an ideological level, they adopted a staunch and symbolic defence of archaic moral codes, underpinned by the traditional family structure, even though these clashed with capitalist development and the consolidation of a consumer society in Brazil.