The Brazilian Director Who’s Up for Multiple Oscars

I want to start with Recife, the setting for this film. How does your home town fit into the history of filmmaking in Brazil?

A hundred years ago, in the silent era, just before sound came, a small group of filmmakers in Recife collaborated to make thirteen feature-length films. Only six survived. The media has always been concentrated in São Paulo and Rio, two thousand kilometres away in the southeast—not only cinema but money, radio, and television. Recife is in the northeast. It had one of the first law schools in Brazil, and many names from literature and music. But not much happened from the nineteen-twenties until the nineteen-seventies, in terms of filmmaking.

In the seventies, local artists began to use Super 8 cameras to make films, and that also became an interesting moment in filmmaking. Many of those films have survived. Then, in the nineties, something really interesting happened: we had a music scene which became very strong. That’s when I was leaving college, and it really pushed me toward developing my own projects. In the past thirty years, we could draw up a list of maybe twenty-five filmmakers, men and women, who are part of a very interesting film scene in Recife. Their films are all very personal and unusual, but they also managed to establish a communication with audiences—not ever becoming blockbusters, but becoming a thing.

How has Recife traditionally been portrayed in films?

We almost never saw Recife on the screen. There was one film from 1983, shot partly in Recife—a historical film by Tizuka Yamasaki, a filmmaker from the south. But that was it, really. I grew up watching telenovelas made in Rio, and of course Hollywood films. So the connection between reality and the projected image simply did not exist in terms of Recife. But, in 2002, when I was in the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival, I saw a film by a filmmaker called Claudio Assis. For the first time, I saw Recife in wide-screen and color, and I thought, I’m finally seeing the city I know.

After that, more films were made in Recife. “Pictures of Ghosts,” the film I did before “Secret Agent,” it’s really like a family album of the city, taken from so many films—from films done a hundred years ago to Super 8 films done in the seventies, maybe some newsreels done in the fifties. And then, in the past thirty years, so many shorts and features have been shot in Recife. That’s when we began to develop what I call a microclimate of local audiences really, really supporting local films. They would play all the local films and there would be lines around the block.

Many years ago, you were among those moviegoers in Recife.

My mother was the real cinephile. I was always being taken to the cinema as a young child. We spent almost five years living in England, where my mom did her Ph.D. research, and England played an important part in my life, showing me different filmgoing experiences. But then I went back to Recife in 1986. I was eighteen, and I rediscovered the city in a completely different way. The downtown was peppered with movie palaces.

You studied journalism and became a film critic. If you had an interest in films, why not make them?

There were no film schools in Recife at the time, and journalism brought me closer to film. From the first day, I got to meet new friends who were also cinephiles, and they dreamed of making films and writing about film or music. And then, slowly, I drifted toward an idea of cinema. I also used the equipment in the school to develop little short video projects. Today, you can make something interesting with a telephone. But, at that time, I needed a Super VHS editing suite with a camera, which I didn’t have. So that’s how I began.

Tell me about a typical early short.

“Lixo nos Canais” was about television—my own take on Brazilian television at the time. Not very sophisticated, but it had some acid. It was kind of sarcastic about the state of television and how it humiliates people, how it’s prejudiced, how it portrayed women and Black people. Grotesquerie was the norm.