A tailor's son, he studied law and practiced journalism but his true love was cinema. After graduating from law school, he traveled to Paris, where he enrolled at the IDHEC film school. Returning to Brazil, he made two shorts in Sao Paolo, then moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he entered the industry as an assistant director. His first feature as a director, Rio 40 Degrees (1955), contained many of the characteristics that would characterize his work and propel him to a leading position in Cinema Novo, Brazil's vibrant New Cinema movement of the 60s and 70s. Echoing the movement's ideal to create a popular national cinema rooted in the ethnic culture, free of foreign influence, the film was shot on city streets and featured real people. It dealt realistically but entertainingly with typical problems, stressing the gulf between rich and poor in Brazilian society. Barren Lives (1963) is considered by many to be Pereira dos Santos's masterpiece. An early landmark production of Cinema Novo, it was a faithful, powerful adaptation of a novel that has been compared to The Grapes of Wrath in its vivid depiction of the plight of drought-ridden migrants and their struggle to survive. The director's best-known film abroad is perhaps How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1971), a robust, lusty, often humorous allegorical mini-epic about a 16th-century French adventurer captured by Indians in the Brazilian jungle who believes he is fully assimilated in the tribe but is instead eaten by his captors as part of a ritual celebration. Hailed by colleagues as "the conscience of Cinema Novo," Pereira dos Santors has certainly been its heart, ears, and eyes.