Walter Salles, 2025 Oscar winner for Best International Film for his "I’m Still Here," shared his expertise at the masterclass in Doha Film Institute’s incubator event Qumra.
The 11th edition of Doha Film Institute’s (DFI) incubator event Qumra, where filmmakers get to workshop their projects and meet with masters of the art of film opened with a masterclass by the Brazilian director Walter Salles, who has won the Best Foreign Film Oscar with "I’m Still Here" this year. DFI’s continued commitment to ensure filmmakers from the region get the support and exposure they need has been especially serendipitous this year, with Walter Salles winning the Oscar after he had been announced as one of the masters.
As part of Qumra, Salles shared his experiences of making films for over 30 years in conversation with Richard Pena, professor of Film Studies and a veteran of Qumra. Salles’s introduction to filmmaking was mostly through documentaries, and as the class progressed, it was clear that the lessons he took from that experience colored the way he has made his films. One of the first things Salles said in the masterclass was that he did not like shooting a film "without being invited," either as a documentary maker to a place, or as a feature film director to a story.
Salles recounted how he was "invited" to make the Oscar-winning "I’m Still Here." The story of how the Paiva family deals with Rubens Paiva’s disappearance by the state is adapted from a book written by their youngest child. As a child, Salles himself was literally invited to the home of the Paivas and he never forgot the welcome the guests felt in a house where the door was never locked and the windows were always open. So, in telling the story of the Paivas, Salles was telling the story of his own childhood, indeed, the story of Brazil under the dictatorship. Salles’ eyes lit up when he talked about how "I’m Still Here" was embraced by different generations of Brazilians and how, after the film was released, young people started sharing videos on social media, telling their own family stories of the period.
The "collective" is something Salles comes back to as he talks about his craft, often calling his actors and the members of the crew his "co-authors." The masterclass introduced the participants to his earlier work, such as "Foreign Land" (1996), about Brazilian immigrants in Portugal. Setting the scene for the clip, Salles talked about it being a sad story because Brazil, a country that welcomed people of different origins, became a country that people started leave. Throughout his masterclass, there was a running theme of Salles’s desire to capture Brazilian identity through its transformations. It was mind-opening to listen to a filmmaker who insisted on the local with no persistent preoccupation for "universal" appeal.
Watching Salles’s "co-author" Fernanda Torres in "Foreign Land," I appreciated how her acting and co-authorship blossoms into the character ot Eunice Paiva in "I Am Still Here." As proof of Torres’s co-authorship, Salles mentioned how in "Foreign Land," while Torres was getting prepared for a scene, she had started humming a song and then Salles realized that was what the scene needed, and so he got rid of three pages of script.
Torres’s co-authorship has another dimension, in that Salles has worked with her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, and when we started watching clips from "Central Station" (1998), about a professional letter-writer who goes on a Brazilian odyssey to locate a young boy’s father, things fell into place for this viewer. As I located the film in my own mental film library, I realized why Torres in "I’m Still Here" felt so familiar – the mother (Montenegro) and daughter (Torres) look like each other like two drops of water.
But of course, even without the physical familiarity, Torres’s Eunice Paiva feels very familiar to the Turkish audience with her manner of dress, taste in furniture and music. The real revelation happens when, after a tiring day, Eunice Paiva comes into the living room with two cups of Turkish coffee on a tray for herself and her husband Rubens. And sure enough, the next day at the ice-cream parlor, Rubens treats her to pistachio ice-cream because she is a Mediterranean princess: "a mix of Italian, Spanish, Greek and Turkish." I put the ingenuity of this detail to Salles in the press conference and he was very happy that different audiences could pick up such references. He said that it was this layering that he payed special attention to, that scenes contained the memories of previous scenes and that life comes to the surface through that.
The masterclass naturally included a discussion of Salles’ "The Motorcycle Diaries," which chronicles the travels of the young Che Guevara through South America. Salles told the story of how the film was in a way "incubated" at Sundance where he met Robert Redford. Redford approached Salles about making the film, inviting the audience to appreciate the importance of incubator events like Qumra. Salles also had praise for Redford, who had the film rights of the book and yet did not shoot it himself, recognizing he was not from the region and so gave it to a Latin American. This sentiment echoed the comment Salles made at the beginning, of how a filmmaker must first be "invited" to a story for a film to work. One imagines that Salles had to do his own emotional labor to be "invited" to other parts of Latin America. He elaborated on how this trip was Che’s "discovery" of South America, as Argentinian culture was so very different from Chile and Peru.
Emphasizing filmmaking as a collective act, Salles is a director who recognizes the dedication and work of other "authors" and is very generous in mentioning not only the classical masters of cinema but also his contemporaries when trying to get his message across. And for this reason, the masterclass felt not only an introduction to his own work, but of the craft of cinema in general. Salles also referenced several musicians and literary figures who have tried to articulate what he himself tries to articulate.
When describing the emotional composition of the scenes after Rubens Paiva is taken away by the police, Salles said he tried to create an atmosphere of abstraction. This atmosphere was created by sounds being muffled, of no record playing, of empty spaces; and referencing Mahmoud Darwish, Salles called it "the presence of absence." Calling the presence of the Palestinian poet into the room, Salles tapped into the emotional space of the audience in Doha, reminding us of how focusing on the experience of your own local will lead you to understand the struggle of the other.
