Aquarius is a feature-length Brazilian-French production directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho. It tells the story of Clara, a middle-class retired music writer in her sixties who is being persuaded to sell her apartment in Recife to a multinational construction company. She is the last one standing against a project that aims to demolish the building and construct a new, modern one; the narrative intertwines her conflicts with proprietors, her family and herself. Released during Brazil’s political crisis in 2016, when first democratically elected woman president Dilma Rousseff went through an impeachment, Aquarius generated controversy due to its cast and crew protests during the following Cannes Film Festival. Despite the attention raised in national and international media, many other unsettling questions were put forward: what exactly was the difference between the political and the cultural elite in Brazil? Moreover, what happens to those who do not have the opportunity to access financial and social power at all? Following Sonia Braga’s critical and audience acclaim for her performance as lead character Clara and using the public/private space dichotomy of the apartment building as a metaphor for a political ground, this paper aims to analyse Aquarius under an intersectional perspective. If, from one side, Clara fights patriarchal, capitalist power by claiming her rights to her private space, her sexuality and her career/family choices, she also oppresses other women (represented by her maids) through many kinds of symbolic violence that are distinctive to Brazilian intellectual middle-class. This paper should also be able to articulate the fictional elements of the narrative, its documentary landscape scenes of Recife and the relational discourses that were built between the film and the former president Dilma Rousseff in order to foster a contextualized discussion about gender, social struggles and citizenship in Brazil.