Oscar Winner Walter Salles Talks Impact of ‘I'm Still Here' on Brazilian Youths and Upcoming Project on Brazilian Soccer Player Sócrates at Doha Qumra Workshop

Yahoo

10-04-2025

Oscar-winner Walter Salles, fresh from scoring the best international feature statuette for 'I'm Still Here,' discussed the impact of his political drama on youth audiences in Brazil and underlined the importance of cinema as 'an extraordinary tool of resistance' while attending the Doha Film Institute's Qumra workshop in Qatar.
'I'm Still Here,' the story of Brazilian activist Rubens Paiva's 1970 disappearance at the hands of the Brazilian military dictatorship and his wife Eunice Paiva's subsequent search for justice, recently marked a historic first Oscar win for Brazil. Salles also pointed out that the film has now been 'embraced by young generations of Brazilians' for whom it provided 'access to a part of their history that had somehow been hidden.'
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'The film has become their film,' Salles added, noting that Brazilian youths 'took possession' of 'I'm Still Here' and then 'went to social media to narrate their own stories and the stories of their families during the dictatorship in Brazil.'
As for what's on the horizon, Salles, speaking to journalists, said he is editing a five-part doc series on Brazilian footballer and political activist Sócrates Brasileiro that he plans to finish by the year's end.
'He was born in the Amazon, in Pará, so it's really about internal migration in Brazil at the very beginning,' Salles said. 'Then it becomes a project about football, and then how he soon perceived that soccer was an extraordinary vehicle for political transformation and he blended all of that into one journey.'
During a wide-ranging masterclass moderated by former New York Film Festival chief Richard Peña, Salles discussed other standout works in his filmography besides his Oscar-winner, including his first feature 'Foreign Land' – which marked the first time Salles worked with 'I'm Still Here' star Fernanda Torres – as well as 'Central Station,' that instead features Fernanda Torres' mother Fernanda Montenegro, and 'The Motorcycle Diaries' which stars Gael García Bernal as Che Guevara but also features quite a lot of non-professional actors.
The latter film, Salles recalled, stemmed from an offer made to him by Robert Redford, who had purchased rights to the book with an eye on directing the film himself, but then proposed the project to Salles saying: 'I want to offer it to a Latin American director.'
Salles' immediate reply was that he needed to think about it. Salles also recalled telling Redford that 'In order to be faithful to that book, you have to basically work with non-actors or actors who are starting out' and that 'you really have to do the long journey, which means that it was a complex project,' he said. Redford closed his eyes for 30 seconds and replied: 'OK, we either do it like this or we don't do it,' said Salles. 'And he embraced it. He embraced this idea, which was really, really great of him.'
In closing the masterclass, Salles urged young Arab directors to follow his footsteps, urging them to make movies amidst injustices. 'Cinema is a way to construct memory and fight against erasing it,' he said. 'Whether you shoot it with an iPhone or make a feature film, it's an extraordinary tool of resistance.'
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