In August 1929, Peixoto was in Paris, on a summer break from his studies in England, when he saw a photograph by André Kertész of two handcuffed male hands around the neck of a woman who is gazing at the camera.

In his article on the film, critic Fábio Andrade notes the influence of D. W. Griffith, Soviet montage, the German expressionist works of F. W. Murnau and Robert Wiene, French Surrealist shorts by Germaine Dulac and Man Ray, Robert J. Flaherty, Carl Theodor Dreyer and particularly Jean Epstein, all of which are visible in German-born Edgar Brasil's cinematography.

[3] One scene takes place at a screening of The Adventurer by Charlie Chaplin, suggesting another important influence on Peixoto's film.

Other screenings took place in private film societies, alongside works by Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, during the 1940s and early 1950s.

[3] Peixoto died in 1992, aged 83, leaving a substantial body of literary work, unproduced screenplays and scenarios, and a fragment of a planned second feature film, Onde a Terra Acaba, which never was completed and mostly lost in a fire.

In 1965, he publicized an article about the film, supposedly written by Eisenstein, praising its "luminous pain, which unfolds as rhythm, coordinated to images of rare precision and ingenuity."

Peixoto was vague about the article's provenance, which lacked primary sources, claiming first that it appeared in Tatler and then an unidentified German magazine and finally admitted that he had written it himself.

[7] By 1959, the single nitrate print of Limite had deteriorated due to poor storage conditions and could no longer be screened, a situation that contributed to its near-mythical status in Brazilian film history.

It was stored at the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia (FNF) until 1966 when the military dictatorship's police force confiscated it, along with works by Eisenstein, Pudovkin and other Soviet directors.

[5] In 2017, the Criterion Collection issued Limite on DVD and Blu-Ray, as one of Martin Scorsese's selections for his World Cinema Project.