This article analyses the movie Ao Redor do Brasil, from Thomaz Reis, taking as theoretical main references Paulo Arantes's, 'O sentido da formação', and Foucault's 'A ordem do discurso'. In this direction, it interprets the movie as a speech immersed in the debates of its time related to the constitution of Brazil as a nation, which was frequent in everyday life and an important intellectual issue in the 20's ans 30's last century. In parallel do what was being discussed in literature and plastic arts, the movie is carefully assembled, using several scenes from Reis's previous movies to visually denote a Nation, not in its way to consolidate itself, but with a countryside already pacified, which would give it a label of civility, therefore inserting it in the civilizing process and, at the same time, with definitive frontiers secured by the presence of a institutions characteristic of the modern State: schools, policy, army and others (an image very different from what could be effectively verified at that time).
civilizing process; ethnographic movie; major Reis; nation