Before the late 1950s Brazilian cinema had caused hardly a ripple worldwide. Then Nelson Pereira dos Santos, who has died aged 89, joined Ruy Guerra and Glauber Rocha to form the Cinema Novo co-operative, initiating exciting developments in Brazilian cinema that inspired political film-makers all over Latin America.

At the time Pereira, the oldest of the three film directors and always considered “the father of new Brazilian cinema”, was also the most experienced. He had already practised what Cinema Novo preached. Adopting Italian neo-realist principles of documentary-style location and shooting with non-professional actors, in 1955 Pereira had made Rio, 40 Degrees, which set the standard for independent cinema in Brazil.

The film, which focused on the activities of five peanut vendors who leave their slum dwellings to sell their wares in the wealthy suburbs, was one of the first Brazilian films shot in the favelas and to feature African-Brazilian characters.

Rio, 40 Degrees, 1955, directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos

By offering both a critique of society and of establishment cinema, Pereira demonstrated his belief that Brazilian films should affirm the principles of popular culture, which he saw as dramatically different from “superficial, elitist cultural forms that follow antiquated colonised models”. By setting up a cooperative agency to handle distribution, Cinema Novo films were free from foreign, especially North American, influence, which hitherto dominated the Brazilian industry.

Born in São Paulo, the son of a tailor and an Italian-born housewife, Pereira studied law and practised journalism, but his true love was cinema. After graduating he went to Paris, where he enrolled at the renowned Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques film school. Returning to Brazil, he made two shorts in São Paulo, then moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he entered the industry as an assistant director. After his second feature, Rio, Northern Zone (1957), also shot in the favelas, about a black samba composer exploited by the music industry, he had to wait six years before he was able to deliver his masterpiece, Barren Lives (1963).

Set in the 1940s, it followed a poverty-stricken family – an itinerant herdsman, his wife and two young sons – who are forced to wander the barren Sertão outback region of Brazil, scratching out an existence. Working closely with Luiz Carlos Barreto, one of the finest Brazilian cameramen, Pereira reflected the reality of the region through high-contrast film shot without filters. “It was a shocking experience – revolutionary, radical – to film without a filter, with a naked lens, to shine the light directly on the characters’ faces,” Pereira recalled.

Nelson Pereira dos Santos in 1967. Photograph: Alamy

A film of quiet dignity and compassion, its use of subjective shots allows more identification with the characters without a trace of self-pity.

Barren Lives, Guerra’s The Guns, and Carlos Diegues’s Ganga Zumba all appeared in 1963, the year before a military junta took over the country. However, despite censorship, Pereira and his colleagues managed to make political films until more repressive rightwing military regime took over in 1969, which forced Rocha into a 10-year exile. Pereira continued to make films, though he had to steer clear of contemporary problems. “The government financed historical films, but it wanted the history to be within official parameters – the hero, the father of the country, all those things we are told since elementary school.”

Nevertheless Pereira, through subtle use of allegory, managed to subvert “official history”. For example, for The Alienist (1970), Pereira used a famous 17th-century tale to make a political parable on contemporary Brazil with visual flair and caustic humour. It told of a new priest who comes to a small town and builds an insane asylum for people who do not agree with his ways and religion, but finds that the many homeless poor seek shelter within its walls.

In How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1971), a dark satire on the idyll of the noble savage, Pereira incorporates contradictions between the images and the discourse of government officials. The plot, seen from a native perspective, is about a 16th-century French adventurer captured by Indians in the Brazilian jungle, who believes he is being fully assimilated into the tribe but is instead eaten by his captors as part of a ritual celebration.

Pereira continued to pursue his own brand of allegory in The Amulet of Ogum (1974), a contemporary tale of African-Brazilian mythology in which a young man (Ney Sant’Anna, the director’s son), who is magically protected from any physical harm, becomes a gunman for a gangster.

In Tent of Miracles (1977), based on Jorge Amado’s novel, about a black sociologist who proposes a theory that miscegenation is necessary and healthy for Brazilian society, Pereira challenged the idea that Brazil is a racial democracy. The jail in Memories of Prison (1984), an adaptation of the autobiographical novel by Graciliano Ramos, who was a political prisoner in the 30s, was, according to Pereira, turned into a metaphor for “the prison of social and political relations which oppress the Brazilian people”.

It proved to be the last of his features to have any impact or urgency, although he continued in his quest to portray Brazilian life from the point of view of “the humble of the earth” through a series of television documentaries. His last two films (2012 and 2013) were documentaries on the singer-composer Antônio Carlos Jobim, who made bossa nova known around the world.

Pereira, who wrote all his own screenplays, was the first film-maker to be elected to the Brazilian Academy of Literature.

He is survived by his wife, Ivelise, and four children, Nelson, Ney, Marcia and Diogo, from his first marriage, to Laurita, who died in 1999.

• Nelson Pereira dos Santos, film director, born 22 October 1928; died 21 April 2018