Walter Salles: “The youngest see the dictatorship as an abstraction, some of the history books”

“He started working in the film years ago and has premiered at a time where the themes they deal with are current …

—Marcelo Rubens Paiva, son of Rubens and Eunice, published the book [de título homónimo] In 2015 instigated by the perception that his mother, who had fought for three decades to keep his family’s memory alive, was beginning to fall into the abyss of Alzheimer’s. And at the same time, and I think it was an act of anticipation, Marcelo writes the book because he begins to perceive that a collective memory of the country is also being lost. For me, that decision was an act of anticipation of what was to come in the world …

“And the premiere of the movie so many years later coincides with that world …

– During the project we clearly perceived that the initial idea of ​​offering a reflection of the past was changing and that we were also talking about the fragility of democracy today, which is an almost universal reality. And I never thought we would be talking about this today, because it seems that there is a process of evolution that makes us make historical mistakes that were already experienced before. And yes, the film offers readings linked to the urgency of the moment, but what seemed more interesting to us was the human trajectory. A story that is very subjective, sometimes quite impressionist and that really has to do with the trajectory of that silent hero that I was lucky to know before and after the change.

“Can the cinema transform or only reflect reality?”

“Two, and are complementary.” There is the act of leaving a reflection of who we were and to generate a thought. Cinema exists to ask questions. And I like that idea that a movie starts when the lights go out at the end of the projection. In Brazil, for example, the film instigated a quite interesting debate about Amnesty’s law. In Brazil and Spain we had very close experiences, we lived a little Goya’s black phase in both countries. In the case of Spanish cinema I think of Saura, for example, with that need to offer portraits of what happened to understand us better and not make the mistakes of the past, but also to encourage the debate about what is needed now. In Brazil, for younger generations the military dictatorship was a bit abstraction, something that belonged to history books.

—In the stories about the dictatorship, and we have seen it in Spanish cinema, many times hagiographies of the victims are made but forget the women and children who stayed, who are doubly victims …

—The point of view of those left behind is rarely used to talk about those periods. They usually look at those fighting to transform reality. But what there was not was that point of view, and above all that feminine point of view of a woman who becomes the protagonist without wanting that position. Also in the book was a very beautiful thing that this victim, although he does not stop fighting, does not get carried away by resentment or hate. She never let himself be portrayed as a victim, on the contrary, when she was asked to be portrayed as someone broken, she offered exactly the opposite, which was a smile, because the smile cannot be defeated. It is a form of resistance. And it is that Eunice is a character that recounts the melodrama, in the face of the immensity of the loss understands that it is an antigone with five children, and in a tragedy the heroin does not cry.

“And from there to make the movie …

—The book impacted me for the fact of being a friend of the family and because I knew well the first part of the story, in those 70s, where I fell in love with participating in so many political and cultural discussions in his home in Rio. I was also very impacted by the way he draws that Eunice was the silent hero of that family. We are talking about a woman who never wanted to be a protagonist. The story forced him to be because after the loss of the husband he had two options, that folded to the authoritarian regime or fight it.

“Was the cinema again with this story was a personal responsibility?”

“And double, yes.” We only started the adaptation after asking each of those involved if they wanted us to make the movie. That is why immersion and therefore also the long development time. We also spend almost two years to offer a realistic reflection of the 70s, with an exhaustive investigation because we had a responsibility with our culture. We had to recreate the dictatorship in a fiction without being fiction.

—The movie begins with a scene at the family table and ends with a similar reunion in our present. And there is another circle that closes when the elderly character of Eunice is played by Fernanda Montenegro, mother of Fernanda Torres, who was also nominated for an Oscar in 1998 with ‘Central Station of Brazil’ …

“On the scenes of family tables, the first is an improvisation that makes us make the second scene.” And it seems to me that they are scenes about the community force that exists within families, but also a nucleus of friends who join these families. And at the end of the movie, that meal is also about the transmission. That is why the last part for me is about a double transmission. The transmission of Eunice’s memory for Marcelo and Marcelo for their children. And also the transmission of Fernanda Montenegro for Fernanda Torres. In both cases it is a testimony of the resistance and family ethics of the Paiva.