Samba has been prominently featured in Brazilian films since the middle of the twentieth century, both as (in the form of diegetic music) an object of filmic narration, i.e. part of the portrayal of Brazilian life and culture, and as non-diegetic music, a means of importing and creating meanings about the world portrayed in a film. The way Brazilian films present and use samba not only builds upon the history of the music and the cultural and social meanings it has acquired and developed throughout that history; it also perpetuates, contextualises, develops, and sometimes criticises those meanings. This dissertation analyses how the use of samba in the soundtracks of selected Brazilian and foreign films from 1940 to 2011 can - intentionally or unintentionally - influence the way the films depict, contextualise, interpret and evaluate social, cultural and political features of contemporary Brazil, such as religion, class and national identity. The identification of the social, cultural and political features of Brazil is mainly based on the three samba genres proposed by Claudia Matos (1982) in her book Acertei no Milhar. the samba lirico-amoroso, the samba apologetico-nacionalista and the samba malandro. The soundtrack analyses of the six films The Three Caballeros (1944), Rio Zona Norte (1957), Orfeu Negro (1959), Cidade de Deus (2002), Tropa de Elite (2007) and Tropa de Elite: 0 Inimigo Agora E Outro (2010) explore how these samba genres are exposed. Selected scenes of other movies such as Saludos Amigos (1943), Carandiru (2003) and Rio (2011), as well as the theatrical movie trailer of Wall-E (2008), are also analysed to support the findings of the dissertation. The semiotic interpretations of the instances of samba in these films aim to illuminate their subtexts and wider cultural and social meanings, whether intentional or unintentional. Keywords: Afro-Brazilians, batuque, Brazil, Brazilian films, Brazilian hip-hop, Brazilian history, Brazilian syncopation, bossa nova, Carmem Miranda, carnava/, cinema novo, chanchadas, cultural cannibalism, ethnomusicology, favela, film scoring, funk carioca, Getulio Vargas, Good Neighbor policy, interpretative communities, intertextuality, jeitinho brasileiro, ma/andros, minor cinema, military dictatorship, music quotes, national identity, otarios, popular music, pre-existing music, racial democracy, retomada, samba, sambistas, seman a de arte moderna, semiotics, soundtracks, tia ciata, tropicalia, whitening ideal.