RIO REMAINS BEAUTIFUL

Synopsis

Within the revelry of Rio's Carnival, Ilma writes to her son. How does she sense his presence in the crowd? Suspended in time, the celebration becomes a space of memory and political resistance.

Statement of the director

RIO REMAINS BEAUTIFUL could be seen as a postcard from Rio that travels through time – at once from 2025 and from centuries past. Like a postcard, the image is familiar: Carnival, samba, a city overflowing with rhythm and life. But like every postcard, there is also a hidden side – the text on the back, the words that reveal what lies behind the beautiful image. In many ways, the film is a ghost story. Beneath the famous celebration lies this other story: a brutal and all-too-common reality where young black lives are lost to police violence and State racism. A story rooted in colonisation, centuries of slavery, and the shadows of the military dictatorship. The film is about a presence that has disappeared but still lingers, both intimate and collective. About the search for the absent – through life around us and through images from others. Carnival felt like the right place to embody Ilma’s words, because it holds vitality, freedom, and people reclaiming the streets. But it’s a celebration that also comes from suffering and resilience – the real roots of samba, and of Brazilian identity and spirituality. The film seeks to uncover these deeper layers of Carnival, bridging eras, and making visible what is usually unseen. It shows how the past echoes in the present, how “invisible“ experiences continue to haunt Brazil. By blending fiction, documentary, and archival fragments, I wanted to reveal a country scarred by contradictions, and to show how the voice of one mother is actually the voice of many – a chorus reverberating across time. The intimate story grows into a collective cry for justice, echoing the struggle of many mothers’ victim of State violence. More than just a return to the roots, the film is an attempt to show how a popular celebration can have a revolutionary role – to be a fight for justice and the resistance against a violent system. In the end, fiction takes on one of its most powerful roles: to attempt what reality cannot. To offer, however briefly, a kind of relief – an aesthetic gesture toward repairing the irreparable.

Selected at

Locarno Film Festival