“In the End, There is No Black Body On the Floor:” An Interview with Anna Muylaert

“No final, não há nenhum corpo negro no chão” – thus director Anna Muylaert sums up the thrust behind her latest film, A Melhor Mãe Do Mundo/The Best Mother in the World, which premiered at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival. The potential body in question is that of Gal (Shirley Cruz), a Black Brazilian woman who refuses to become the victim of domestic violence and who sets out to find a better life for herself and her children. Gal is a catadora, as the people who pull heavy carts collecting recyclables are called, and who are ubiquitous in Brazilian cities. An abusive partner, Leandro (Seu Jorge), forces her to escape her home with her kids and hit the streets of São Paulo. To dispel their fears, she tells five-year-old Benin and his older sister Rihanna that they’re going on an adventure. Gal’s destination is the house of her cousin, all the way to the outskirts of the 12 million megalopolis. What follows is a journey that holds moments of magic and wonder and of extreme vulnerability, of deep personal disappointments and new revelations. Muylaert’s protagonist is a modern-day Mother Courage, a gutsy woman who decides to take her life into her own hands, but unlike Bertolt Brecht’s iconographic heroine, she is not a tragic figure – she survives ‘her war’ by discovering a community where she least expected it.¹

The Berlin Film Festival is familiar territory for the renowned Brazilian director. In 2016, Mãe Só Há Uma/Don’t Call Me Mother premiered here, and the year before, Que Horas Ela Volta/The Second Mother, won the coveted Panorama Audience Award. As the titles of these films indicate, motherhood is a central concern for Anna Muylaert, who has explored its many facets and contradictions by combining personal storytelling with a precise analysis of the racial and class divide operative in modern-day Brazil. The Second Mother, Muylaert’s critically and commercially most successful film to-date, revolves around Val, a maid (played by Regina Casé, a major star in Brazil), who is like a surrogate mother for Fabinho, the teenage son for whose family she worked for a long time. When her own estranged daughter Jéssica suddenly enters her life again, her priorities suddenly begin to shift. A perceptive analysis of class privilege, The Second Mother is a celebration of the upward mobility made possible during the first presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011).

The Second Mother

In Mãe Só Há Uma/Don’t Call Me Son, Muylaert looks at a rather different family configuration. This film tells the (true) story of Pierre, who at age 17 learns that the mother who allegedly adopted him had in fact stolen him. While she lands in prison, Pierre is returned to the biological family who had spent years tracking him down. It’s the tale of a young man robbed of his identity just as he is about to find himself. Like The Second Mother, this film too poses fundamental questions of what it means to be a family in modern Brazil. Barbara Alvarez’ perceptive camerawork carefully tracks how the teenager’s pent-up emotions slowly turn into rage and rebellion. Daniela Nefussi provides a remarkable performance playing both the biological mother and the woman who raised him. 

Both Don’t Call Me Son and The Second Mother are set in São Paulo, as is The Best Mother in the World. It is the city where Muylaert was born and where she has spent most of her professional life. After studying filmmaking at the School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo, she worked as a critic before turning to writing, directing and producing her own films. Indeed, her first visit at the Berlinale, in 2006, was as the writer of the internationally successful drama, O Ano Meus Pais Saíram de Férias/The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (Cao Hamburger), which, like the recent Academy Award-winning Ainda Estou Aqui/I’m Still Here (Walter Salles, 2024), is set during the Brazilian dictatorship.

Before striking out on her own, Muylaert had a successful career in television and as script writer. She is the creator and writer of two successful youth-centred shows on Brazilian television, Mundo da Lua (1991/92), and Castelo Rá-Tim-Bum (1994-97), the latter an educational show for children sometimes compared to Sesame Street. Her path first crossed with actress Shirley Cruz in 2005, when Cruz starred in the HBO series Filhos do Carnaval, which Muylaert co-authored. Muylaert’s directorial debut, Durval Discos (2002), revolves around a nerdy guy who runs a record store and who still lives with his mother. Their peaceful lives are overturned when a maid they had just hired suddenly disappears, leaving behind her young daughter. Mother and son soon learn that the girl has been kidnapped and is actually the daughter of a rich couple from the countryside. Despite this premise, the film is a light-hearted comedy propelled by a 1970s soundtrack and has been praised for evoking a time and place that has long ceased to exist.

The theme of kidnapping, sounded already in Muylaert’s first feature, and central to Don’t Call Me Son, is also front and centre in her film Chamado a Cobrar (2012, which translates as ‘collect call’), a television thriller about a high society woman who gets a call that her daughter has been kidnapped. The mother falls for the scam and is extorted over the phone until her credit card is maxed-out. There are overtones of a kidnapping as well in the suspenseful beginning of The Best Mother in the World, when Gal secretly rushes her children out of the apartment while Leandro is taking a shower. While these films range far and wide in mood and genre, together they acknowledge that Brazil ranks highest in kidnapping rates among Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Don’t Call Me Son

Another consistent concern of Muylaert’s films is the social and racial stratification of São Paulo, and the impact of urban renewal and gentrification. Durval Discos pays homage to the vinyl stores that were once ubiquitous in Bairro de Pinheiros in eastern São Paulo. Perceptively, the film ends with the demolition of the building that houses the titular store. The Second Mother is set in Morumbi, an affluent middle-class neighbourhood, while the apartment to which Val and Jéssica move at the end of the film is in the much poorer district of Embu-Guaçu. Notably, this apparent geographical downward mobility is countered by the fact that Jéssica’s education will eventually allow her to rise above her modest background, a first in her family. The overall thrust of the film is to call into question the clear demarcation of the private sphere that underlies the systemic exploitation of domestic labour. In fact, both Jéssica and Pierre can be seen as members of an emerging new class in Brazil, “namely ‘class C’, which has now invaded spaces such as shopping malls and airports that until recently were solely inhabited by the elite and the upper middle class.”²

Among all of Muylaert’s films to-date, The Best Mother in the World most directly engages with the urban geography of São Paulo. The street-level view of that film stands in striking contrast to her penultimate film, O Clube das Mulheres de Negócios/The Club of Business Women (2024), a satire about the crisis of patriarchy set in a women-run gated private club and thus deliberately removed from any social reality of the city. The Best Mother in the World can be described as a road movie in which the vehicle in question is not a car but a recycling cart that is pulled rather than driven. Gal’s journey follows the congested streets of downtown São Paulo from the Associação de Catadores Nova Glicério, where she works, to her cousin’s house in Itaquera, on the outskirts of the city. From there, Gal and her kids travel to the nearby soccer stadium of Corinthians before reaching their new home in an occupied building in the city centre – a route that, according to Muylaert, “has never been shown in cinema.”³

While The Best Mother in the World includes moments of pure magic and a fairytale-like ending, its overall sensitivity evokes an urban realism. This claim to authenticity also entails incorporating the people who work and live at two of the film’s most prominent locations – the Nova Glicério recycling station, and the Ocupação 9 de Julho, one of the most famous occupied buildings in São Paulo. These grittier parts of São Paulo are rarely seen in feature films and excellently captured by cinematographer Lílis Soares. In the opening scenes, she keeps her camera at eye level or even below Gal’s face, thus emphasising the strain on her caused by hard physical labour and domestic abuse. Standing in her cart, her kids rise high above her, excited and jubilant, and seemingly well-protected from the harsh reality before them. As Muylaert explains in our interview, Soares was chosen precisely because her work has focused almost exclusively on Black Brazilian Cinema. 

While Muylaert’s previous films predominantly revolved around white middle- and upper-middle class city dwellers, The Best Mother in the City World features an almost all-black cast, another first for her. Lead Shirley Cruz first made a name for herself in Cidade de Deus/City of Gods (Fernando Mireilles & Kátia Lund, 2002), a film that proved a game-changer for the representation of Blacks in Brazilian cinema, and that subsequently opened many doors for up-and-coming Black actors, as Cruz points out in our interview. Her performance captures the remarkable transformation that Gal undergoes: The opening scene shows her as a battered and bruised woman, who in halting sentences and under obvious shock denounces her abusive partner – the initial act of bravery that will set up her fight against violence and for survival and self-respect. At the end, we see her literally radiant as she and her children are surrounded by a new community. Cruz is cast opposite Brazilian super star Seu Jorge, not only an accomplished actor but also a major musician. Like Cruz, he was cast in City of Gods, and like her character in the film, he is from a favela in Rio de Janeiro. He was one of the first artists to sing about favelas (“Eu sou favela”), and to make Black lives visible to a mainstream Brazilian audience. While we only see him in a few scenes, his presence is felt throughout, combining menace, vulnerability, and charisma. Apart from his music, Seu Jorge might be best-known to an English-speaking audience as Péle dos Santos, a member of Steve Zissou’s (Billy Murphy) crew in The Life Aquatic (Wes Anderson, 2005), who sings Portuguese covers of David Bowie songs while strumming his guitar.

The Best Mother in the World is a battling cry against the violence and abuse women suffer everywhere, but especially so poor Black women. And it’s a celebration of individual courage and of the urge to resist and to survive, powered by the love for one’s children, a love that reaches further than any other love. In Muylaert’s portrayal, the best mothers in the world are the mothers who never stop fighting for self-respect.

The Best Mother in the World

The following interview was conducted on February 17, 2025, during the Berlin Film Festival. Halfway through the conversation we were joined by lead actor Shirley Cruz.

– G.G & S.S

*****

This is your third Berlinale after attending in 2015 and 2016. How does it feel to be back?

The first time I came to the Berlinale was actually in 2007, when O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias/The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (Cao Hamburger) was in Competition, for which I co-wrote the script. I love it here – it is a big festival, lots of screenings, and a lot of respect. It’s almost mind-blowing.

There are 12 Brazilian films at the Berlinale this year, which is impressive. Director Gabriel Mascaro, who is presenting O último azul/The Blue Trail, said yesterday in a press conference that there is a real boom in the Brazilian film industry, an explosion of energy after the dire years of the Bolsonaro regime, when funding was cut across the board. Is that your impression as well?

Yes, there is a re-birth of Brazilian cinema after Bolsonaro. It is truly impressive. Apart from the new Brazilian films here, there is also Iracema, by Jorge Bodansky and Orlando Senna (1975). It’s amazing, I love that film. It shows the beginning of the destruction of the Amazon in the 1970s. We are all part of the movement we call Retomada, which spans between 1995 until Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016 – that is, some 30 years of independent cinema.⁴ We have strength, we have new voices: we have Karim Aïnouz, we have Kleber Mendonça Filho, you have me, you have Cláudio Assis. It boils. And now after the Bolsonaro years, we are back in full force.

The Best Mother in the World marks the first time you made a film with private funds. Why did you decide to do that and how did that impact the making of the film?

I went with a private producer because of the emptiness that we had during the Bolsonaro years, when public funding was too difficult to get. With the previous films, I was the independent producer. It was just us – the director and the producer. Now, we have a new model that comes from the streaming platforms, and it’s corporate. It’s not only you and the producer, there is a chain of bosses now. And with them comes a stricter hierarchy, which leads to much more fighting. But in the end, it’s still my film. I gave everything just the same, yet the process was more difficult.

Do you feel that you could still retain your vision?

Yes, but in order to maintain authority, I had to fight. Now there is this notion of “notes” from the producers, which Netflix invented. Netflix is messing with the protocol that art cinema took a 100 years to build. With this platform, there could be one young executive who would be taking care of 20 projects at the same time. This young executive with little or no experience is now a boss whose main responsibility is to maintain his job. So he oversees these projects with his ‘team’ and takes notes, which they then pass on. It has the smell of authoritarianism, because these notes are written in stone and signed by the company, which means you do not even know who wrote it. There used to be discussion, talking, and finding the right solution together. Now it’s top-down. This is why the films are getting worse all the time. The corporate spirit has gotten into the picture. And the smaller companies begin to repeat this process. We used to be partners and now it’s like you’re an employee. I had to take medicine to get through it because it’s very distressing. Our work needs sensibility and poetry, and it needs respect. To direct a film without your decisions being respected is tough. And this happens all over the world. 

Will your new film stream online?

Probably so, it’s the way things are happening now. 

When the Brazilian government funds a film, are there fewer restrictions?

It takes much more time to get the funding, because it comes from several sources, so everything takes longer. The funds are then bundled by Ancine (Agência Nacional do Cinema). But once you have the money, you are your own boss and there is collaboration. In that way it’s much more democratic.

There are collaborations between producers and directors as you say, but all sorts of other collaborations as well – it was very moving to see Shirley Cruz holding your hand tightly on stage after the premiere of your film. How did that bond of love and respect come about? 

I have admired Shirley since I first saw her face in a series I wrote many years ago. I have always had an eye on her and lately we have become friends. Shirley is a very strong woman. She is a Black woman, and I am a White woman, so we come from very different backgrounds. Since we live in such a racist country, things are much more difficult for her. In my education, you have to be polite, obedient, cross your legs. In White culture, women are more repressed, yet in Black culture, the difficulties are much bigger because of the racism, and I feel that women therefore develop more strength to face it. When I met Shirley, we spoke about that, and she showed me her strength in different situations. And that’s when I thought that I need people like her around me. We started developing a bond of admiration, and learning, and exchanging. We women suffer a lot of abuse and disrespect all the time. And what do I need – I need someone to hold my hand, someone who goes with me. We must be very brave, and we need alliances. There is a lot of abuse and disrespect, and you need people who don’t let it slide and who say, ‘Stop. This is a problem. Let’s talk about this.’ There are not too many people who are like that, but Shirley is like that, and I am like that, and we give strength to each other. And I think she gives me more than I give her. 

We really noticed a Black aesthetics in the film, which can be attributed also to cinematographer Lílis Soares, who has a distinguished record working in Black film. When she won the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Cinematography at Sundance in 2023, she commented that her lens allows her to visit her roots and explore Black and diasporic aesthetic codes in depth, so as to create another gaze and other narratives. How did the collaboration between you and Lílis work out?⁵

It was not always easy to work together, because we have a very different gaze. But I understood I had to give it to her. I left it in her hands. Because Black Brazilian culture is so powerful, so colourful. Take Mangueira, the famous School of Samba from Rio de Janeiro – their colours are green and pink. It’s a combination of colours that only Afro-Brazilians would use. Mine is more European, it comes from a different tradition. She is more African. The Best Mother in the World is my most colourful film. For most of my other films, I collaborated with Bárbara Álvarez, who is from Uruguay, and who worked with Lucrecia Martel on La Mujer sin Cabeza/The Headless Woman (2008), and who shot Whisky (Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll, 2004). Bárbara and I have worked together for ten years, and I love her. But when I approached her about making this film, she said that her vision is very European and for this film I should work with Lílis Soares. And Bárbara was right. The film is totally Lílis’ vision, which I would call an Afro-Brazilian gaze. 

Seu Jorge and Shirley Cruz in The Best Mother in the World

How does Seu Jorge fit into this framework?

He is such a profound actor, like a rock. So powerful. He is a big star. He was always late – like really late! He was supposed to be there at eight o’clock in the morning and he appeared at three in the afternoon. But he was magical, he always arrived at the right time. We only had him for two or three days, that’s it. But his presence is so big. 

You said about Regina Casé, who plays Val in The Second Mother: “She is black, white and indigenous at once – all the faces of Brazil. A portrait of the nation.” What does Shirley Cruz bring to the film? 

When you talk about the Afro-Brazilian experience you talk about creating visibility. Historically speaking, Black people were invisible in Brazil for many centuries. Shirley is Black, and she represents that. She is preto retinta, she is really Black in skin colour. And in this film, she is the centre of the plot, the frame, and of everything – and that was beautiful for her and for me as well. That is the reality that Lílis Soares filmed.

Your new film contains some tough topics: child abuse, women working with garbage, humiliation, loneliness. What inspired you to tell that story and how did you go about the research?

Women are abused. I myself am abused all the time. That’s cultural, and the more I grew in my career, the more disrespect I lived. That’s the seminal inspiration. But when I heard of these catadoras who took their children to work I fell in love with this image and I decided to talk about abuse through that character. That’s the inspiration. When I took my team to the place where the garbage recyclers work, the Novo Glicério, they expected to see abject poverty, to see poor disdained girls and women. But instead, they saw their power. One of the catadoras, Fabiene da Silva, for example, is so poor that the walls of her house were made out of paper. She economised with the salt for the food. If the kids didn’t eat the food, then she would add a little. But she is so intelligent, she has lived such a life, had faced so many things and she narrates it so well with so much passion that it moves you. I was so impressed by her nobility, the beauty with which she talked about her life. The power of these women is unbelievable. And that’s Gal.

Many of your films are about mothers, and about how complex the relationship between mothers and children can be. In The Second Mother, Val is both Jessica’s and Fabiano’s mother; Aracy and Gloria are both Pierre’s mother in Don’t Call Me Son. In the new film, this relationship plays out differently. The mother in this film is on the run from an abusive partner and she is homeless for a while. And here we have a mother who will not abandon her kids, as some of your earlier mother figures did, regardless whether they do so voluntarily or involuntarily. What makes this mother unique for you?

Among all my mother figures, Gal is the most mature mother. And she is really strong. Gal is responsible; she doesn’t give up. She is literally the best mother of all of them. When she understands the threat to her daughter, she reacts immediately. So many women put marriage before the children, but Gal doesn’t. I think that’s the main idea of the film. Mothers have the power to stop the abuse, but they often don’t. You wonder, why don’t things change? Because we were raised to obey and raised to accept abuse. And it’s a big inner fight to change, and that’s why mothers stay in abusive relationships. It’s like a curse. Even being a director, and so successful and even powerful, the disrespect is always there. It’s exhausting. Why is that still in my life? But in fact, it is everywhere, especially towards Latin American artists. In fact, at the Grammy Awards this year, it was shocking that an artist of the stature of Milton Nascimento, a musical giant worldwide, was shown total disrespect when they seated him and his crew in the stands, far from other prominent guests. 

The first shot we see of Gal is of her back and neck, and then we see a closeup of her face and she is incoherent, apparently traumatised. The camera highlights Gal’s stress and anxiety. There is also a sense of her dysfunctionality. Her expressions oscillate between anger and rage. In the final shots, Gal is happy and shining with an inner radiance. She takes a shower almost as if to show her rebirth and transformation within the community of the occupied building. The film ends showing Gal as a different human being; she is a happy mother. 

Yes, the film is about her growing self-respect. You can only be a good mother if you have self-respect. It’s like a chain. If you want to be a good mother, you have to respect yourself. It’s like an emergency drill on the airplane: first you put the mask on yourself, then on the children.

It’s striking how the film evokes Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage and her Children. The iconography of Gal pulling the cart is so arresting, and life in the streets of São Paulo can be a war zone, like the Thirty-Years’ War Mother Courage lived through. But beyond that, Gal’s story is very different. Ultimately, Gal is not a tragic person.

I have not read Mother Courage or seen a production of it before I came up with the idea for my film, but I was interested in the figure of the mother pulling her cart and working with her children. It has the power of an archetype. Brecht got it, but as Salman Rushdie says, all stories are there, we just fish for them. I think my film could be remade in China or in India, because it’s universal. My film is about race, but it is not exclusively about race. It’s about courage, abuse and the journey of someone. In the beginning, Gal believes in marriage, but marriage proves impossible. Then she believes in the family, but they disappoint her too. In the end, she will find her new place in the community. And I love it when Monda, a resident at the Ocupação 9 de Julho, introduces Gal as her cousin.

The Ocupação 9 de Julho building is well-known in São Paulo and an icon of homeless Brazilians’ fight for dignified housing. It seems that the concept of the ocupação is that there’s a place for you where you can live for free, and eventually you contribute, and when you can, you move on.

Yes, that’s the basic idea. In São Paulo there are a lot of empty buildings. And there is the Homeless Workers Movement (MTST, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Teto) who find the buildings, set a date for the invasion, and then they go in. In the beginning, it was government office buildings that were being occupied, and the rooms were very small and entire families lived in those narrow quarters. Right wing people consider this a crime, they are afraid to lose their own homes, too. But no, it is a very organised form of work. Carmen Silva, a charismatic figure, leads the movement in the city (MSTC, Movimento Sem-Teto do Centro). Her advocacy is portrayed in Eliane Caffé’s documentary Era o Hotel Cambride/Cambrigde Hotel (2016). The building in which we shot the film is a big occupation. They make lunch every Saturday, and they have cultural events and entertainment. I wanted to put mostly women and children when Gal arrives, to create a connection for her and children. 

We noticed that Chico is the only man there. 

Yes, the one man you see in that scene is Chico César, a famous singer songwriter. He has been my friend for 30 years now. His big hit is “Mama África,” in which he sings about a single mother who works in the supermarket. She has to leave the kids when she goes to work, but she’s nevertheless always with them.

Overall, the music in your film seems very important and also symbolic. Right after Gal’s deposition at the police station, we see the recycling facility and the catadoras working there sorting through the trash. Significantly, we hear the rap song “Luta Cansativa” (“Tiring Battle”) by RZO and Negra Li, which foreshadows the battle that is to come. And then there is the Samba, signalling Gal and Leandro are from the favelas in Rio.

Yes, the music was very important for this film. There is also Titãs and his song “Cabeça Dinossauro,” which means dinosaur head. The song is very tribal, there are references to the belly of a mammoth. We hear that song early in the film, when Gal is pulling her cart and her kids through heavy traffic in a thoroughfare of São Paulo as she is trying to escape from Leandro. And then there is the samba at the barbeque. And then, at the end, there is “Maria, Maria,” a very famous song by Milton Nascimento that is so moving. He wrote this for his mother who had to give him for adoption, and to all the mothers who cannot raise their own kids.

It seems significant that Gal leaves the samba circle at her cousin’s house. It appears to be a moment of reconciliation, but then it becomes clear to her that the abuse will not stop and that her daughter will not be safe.

Yes, who would ever leave a samba circle with Seu Jorge! 

[Shirley Cruz joins the conversation at this point.]

Shirley, in this film you give the performance of your life. You literally carry the film. You can see that you gave it your all. What made you want to play this role, and how did you get it?

Shirley Cruz: Anna is an extraordinary artist with a great vision. She makes cinema with belief. It’s impossible to be a Brazilian artist or actor and not want to work with Anna. When I saw the script, I said, What is this? It’s amazing! It contained such well-rounded characters that I was really interested. There simply aren’t many roles for Black women my age. Other great Brazilian actresses were trying to get the role as well, so I flew to São Paulo from Rio, and I came to win. I didn’t want to send outtakes, as most people would – I went to the casting in person and paid for the trip myself. Let me tell you, it was not simple luck – it was hard work. I don’t have time to waste.

Was it hard getting into Gal’s life and circumstances?

Shirley Cruz: I prepared my entire life. Gal was always the character I wanted to play. I wanted to put my body, my energy, my experience, and my uterus in the service of this character. Gal and I are different, but we have many things in common. Even though I am Black also, my life does not resemble Gal’s, I am happily married, I don’t come from the projects. I had to learn to inhabit that role. The only part that coincides with my biography is being from Rio de Janeiro – something that was originally not in the script and that was added when I was cast. But Gal and I intersect on many levels. We are Black women who have suffered all kinds of violence. That gives me a certain experience. I am someone who survived a feminicide attempt. In the past, it used to be shameful to talk about surviving an attempted murder. Now I am cured spiritually. It is important to say to other girls, Girls, there is no time to waste. If you’re going through this kind of situation, you need to survive, you need ask for help, you need to run away. The character of Gal unites all the elements that I embody: being an actress (which she is when she invents a story for the kids), being a woman, and being Black. Gal was perfect for me. After reading the script, and after having met Anna, I could envision what Anna wanted. Anna wrote the script; together we added the human element. The script encouraged us to meet the catadoras working in the garbage recycling facility, and to get to know them and to share our experiences with one another. These are stories of victory. Gal’s is the story of someone who turns her destiny around, just gets up, fights for her liberty, fights for the freedom to love, and who wants to breathe peacefully. I need a world where we can all live peacefully. So I threw all my energy into making this a humble contribution. And I would like to say that you don’t see a single black body lying on the floor.

How did City of God prepare you for the role?

Shirley Cruz: My career is connected to the things I can do. City of God was a watershed movement. It opened up so many opportunities for Black artists. And that’s where the story begins. 

It must have been very hard to pull the heavy cart through the city, and filming in the congested streets of São Paulo. What were the physical demands for your role?

Shirley Cruz: Yes, it was hard to pull that cart. They offered me a double, but I refused. I needed to feel the pain, it had to be difficult, because it helped me to act. 

Anna Muylaert: Filming in the streets of São Paulo was hard for the kids and the team. Benin was five years old when we were shooting, and he was working. He was having fun, as we can see, but he was also tired.

We noticed that the film shows several of the characters taking showers or bathing. The first time we see Leandro it is through the shower curtain. Gal also takes a shower early in the film, right after work, before she goes to the school to pick up the kids. Benin takes a bubble bath at his aunt’s house. Gal and the kids bathe in the city fountain when they are homeless. And in one of the final scenes of the film, Gal is taking a glorious shower in her new place in the ocupação. Brazilians are very clean and sometimes even take two showers a day, but why does the film insist on this?

Anna Muylaert: One of the roles of women directors is to show the real body. It’s important to get away from idealisations. After working all day with garbage and dirt, Gal deserved a good shower. You want to leave that smell behind! Our idea was to show a naked woman that is almost sacred, almost like a saint. We did not want to make it sexy. It was a respectful nudity. And I wanted to show that the women who work as catadoras are not only clean, they are also intelligent, hard-working and truly wonderful – but our society does not know about that. I did not want to make a film romanticising poverty. It’s about Gal’s search for happiness and freedom. 

Throughout the film, there is a strong sense of impending violence. Before we see Leandro, we see his gun. He is strong man, with a strong will. And we see the bruises in Gal’s face at the beginning. Yet remarkably, unlike many other Brazilian films dealing with poverty a portrayal of direct violence is almost completely absent in your film. Why did you choose to do that?

Anna Muylaert: At the end of the film, you do not see a Black body on the floor. That was important to me. When I showed the script to an executive working for a streaming platform, he commented: We see a gun but there is no femicide. We approach rape but there is no rape. We approach child abuse but there is no child abuse – so your film is not strong. The traditional dramaturgy always relies on rape, but you simply cannot repeat those images anymore. One thing was very clear to me from the beginning of the project – we have to create new images.

Shirley: In fact, as an actress, the most important aspect for me is to put my body in the service of the one woman who decides not to die. 

The way film represents Gal, Leandro and the other characters and their environment is without any glorification of misery. The film felt respectful, it’s not pitiful or exploitative. How did you accomplish that?

Anna Muylaert: I think if you respect human beings, you respect the characters. I always try to respect them, no matter whether they are flawed or not. Leandro is a Black broken man, but we don’t get to hate Leandro. Even the grandfather who has Alzheimers is important. I love that character. Like a painter, I try to take care of each element, each flower. 

Have you shown the film to the catadoras and the members of the Ocupaçao?

Anna Muylaert: We have shown the film to the community of garbage recyclers. It was very moving. Most of these women have never been to a movie theatre. They liked it. We are in touch all the time, they know we’re here in Berlin, we’re sending them pictures. They are very much a part of this process. We will certainly show it at the Ocupação 9 de Julho. They organise a lot of cultural events.

What do you hope the film will achieve?

Anna Muylaert: Before we made the film, I did not see the carts in the streets. The city is full of them, but they were invisible to me. Now I see each one of them. I hope these workers will get more esteem and self-respect.

With Anna Muylaert (second from left) and Shirley Cruz (right) at Berlin Film Festival

Endnotes