The work History and Utopia: the Documentary of Silvio Tendler investigates the pact with the construction of political memory assumed by the Brazilian director, as well as discusses some of the mechanisms responsible for the resulting sense of displacement of his narrative construction in the contemporary scene. Tendler authored more than thirty documentary films about public personalities and national historical processes, both indentified by the desire to rework the political memory and raise consciousness the authoritarian past of the State. But his urgency to narrate dreams of liberation, to follow political ruptures, and to carry out the new hopes for the construction of a democratic future enters into conflict with the contemporary productions in the genre. In these productions the abandonment of the horizons of dedication to build utopias becomes explicit, as does the rejection of attention to the public sphere of political participation. To understand this process, we write a brief biographical description, select a few of his films, observe his politics of historical representation and the movements chronicled by the author. We place his work in dialogue with the main characteristics encountered in recent narrative documentary and with the theoretical tendencies of the genre. Doing so, we try and understand by what mode of rupture with the pillars of thought that have guided occidental modernism, that created accounts of emancipation, ends up creating suspicion of the collective identity reclaimed in Tendlers work.