This research is about seven movie pictures based on historical facts produced during the Brazilian military dictatorship, between 1968 and 1980. Within the analysis of these films, there is the founding idea that cinema is a way to shape different representations of history, not only through the diegesis but also through the way this story is told (the cinematographic narrative). The aim is to find the director s motives and intentionalities, and their politic consequences. Both classical historic films and modern ones are approached. At the first ones, the heroism and the absence of serious conflicts are shown like in the Hollywood pictures, in which history equals spectacle. The past is analysed like a cluster of facts supposedly shown like they really happened. The simple past is the corresponding tense here. Modern approach opens way to a critical and unconclusive view of history. Extremely violent scenes and mixed temporalities, a documentary-like camera and Brechtian acting are some of the elements of these pictures. The films tell the past from a contemporary point of view. They reject the simple past tense and adopt a kind of future of the past tense: history didn t happen, it would happen.