Cartola – música para os olhos (Cartola – Music for the Eyes, 2007) is a music documentary by Lírio Ferreira and Hilton Lacerda dedicated to Cartola, one of the most important samba singers and composers of the twentieth century. Cartola was born Angenor de Oliveira in 1908 Rio de Janeiro, the grandson of a senator's cook in the brand-new Brazilian Republic. However, following the death of his grandfather and the decline of their economic situation, the family moved from the middle-class neighbourhoods of Catete and Laranjeiras to the favela of Mangueira. In 1928, Angenor, who had been interested in carnival parades since an early age, became one of the founders of Estação Primeira de Mangueira, a prominent samba ‘school’ in the city. The songs he composed in the 1930s and 1940s became quite popular, but they were recorded only by white singers, such as Francisco Alves and Carmen Miranda. This inequality between poor black or mixed-race composers and middle-class white singers was the rule at that time and one of the biggest contradictions in the history of Brazilian popular music. In the late 1940s, Cartola experienced personal problems and disappeared from the artistic scene, but in the late 1950s, young left-wing artists and intellectuals brought him back to public attention, which allowed him to open a short-lived restaurant in the 1960s and record a few albums in the 1970s. He died in Rio in 1980, by which point he was already a national symbol (see Silva and Oliveira Filho 1983).

The project Cartola – música para os olhos began as an invitation from the cultural institute Itaú Cultural to Ferreira and Paulo Caldas to write a fictional script about Cartola. Lacerda soon joined the project, encouraged by his colleagues, and Caldas eventually dropped out due to other commitments. The Rio de Janeiro-based company Raccord then stepped in and Ferreira and Lacerda developed the project, now to be produced as a documentary.