The most notable characteristic of his filmmaking is his utopian perspective. He has filmed many documentaries in Brazil, most notably: the mini-series O Espírito da Utopia (The Spirit of Utopia), the film Utopia e Barbárie (Utopia and Barbarism) which took 19 years to be filmed, and his most recent film Privatizações: A Distopia do Capital (Privatisation: The Capital Dystopia). Tendler has come to be known as “the filmmaker of broken dreams” or “the filmmaker of losers”, due to the fact that he has filmed documentaries about Brazilian Great Utopians, such as the filmmaker Glauber Rocha, the guerrilla fighter Marighella and the former Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitscheck.