Walter Salles recalled that the film was seen in theaters by five million Brazilians and managed to overtake the barrier of the country’s binary political system. “It is not a movie that is recognized, it is the culture that is being recognized, it is the way we do cinema in Brazil,” said the filmmaker.
Brazilian director Walter Salles, who won theconsidered that this recognition is for Brazilian culture and cinema, which today echoes around the world.
“It is not a movie that is recognized, it is the culture that is being recognized, it is the way we do cinema in Brazil, it is Brazilian literature with the book of Marcelo Paiva, it is Brazilian music,” said the filmmaker, behind the scenes of the gym’s Oscar.
“This whole journey was about redoing the memory of a family while redoing the memory of a country for 21 years of military dictatorship,” said Salles, who dedicated to the golden statuette to “three extraordinary women”: Eunice Paiva, the protagonist of history, and actresses and Fernanda Montenegro.
Walter Salles recalled that the film was seen in theaters by five million Brazilians and managed to overtake the barrier of the country’s binary political system.
According to the director, the resonance he is having in international markets, including Portugal and the United States, can be understood by the increasing fragility of democracy all over the side.
“I never thought it would be so fragile, even in this country, and so what happened in Brazil in the past seems very close to what is happening now,” said Walter Salles.
“The film is mainly about loss and how we react to it, how we overcome it and how we fight injustice,” he said.
“This woman had the possibility of breaking or embracing her life and she embraced her life,” he said, referring to the form of resistance of Eunice Paiva, based on affection.
“Memory was at the center of this project”
Salles also stressed the importance of journalism, literature, cinema and songs as a way of preserving memory.
“Memory was at the center of this project. We live at a time when memory is being erased as a power project,” he said. “What we do can fight against the possibility of oblivion and this is very important.”
To evoke the authenticity of the moment portrayed, the team used 35mm and Super 8 as a way to dive the public in the past without artificial interference. “I tried to work in a way that we could recreate the memory of a specific period in Brazil, the seventies, and one way to do was that was to escape the digital.”
With this Oscar for best international film, Salles still hopes to give an incentive to independent films in Brazil.
His victory was highly celebrated in the interview room, where the Lusa Agency and various Brazilian media were able to do interviews with the filmmaker and congratulate him in Portuguese, a huge rarity behind the scenes of the Oscars.
– With Lusa
