Berlinale | Interview with Gabriel Mascaro
“Thinking Politically About the Aging Body”
For his film “O último azul,” Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro received the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale. It presents a dystopian story about the life prospects of older people.
The main character of the film O último azul"(The Blue Trail), 77-year-old Tereza (Denise Weinberg), lives and works in an industrial city in the Amazon. One day, she receives an official request from the government to move into a retirement home. The government justifies this measure by stating that it wants to relieve the children of the elderly. Young people are expected to work and produce even more. However, Tereza is not ready to give up her life. She wants to fulfill one last wish: to fly in an airplane. She sets out on a journey to seek a different future. With an excellent cast, a well-constructed script, and precise editing, the film presents viewers with a fantastic utopia.
How did the idea of making a film about an almost 80-year-old woman come about?
I grew up with older people, including my parents, two grandmothers, and my grandfather. We always took care of the elderly together. When my grandfather passed away, my grandmother, at the age of 80, surprisingly started painting. It was interesting to observe her in this moment of renewal. Everyone thought she would fall into depression, but she did something entirely different. She developed new desires, a new existence, and sought a new life with different meaning and horizons. This deeply moved me and sparked my research and desire to make this film. I wondered how I could politically read and think about the aging body in our society.
One of the core points of the film is neoliberalism, with its focus on productivity and the control of one's desires. You create a character who opposes this dynamic. What exactly is at stake?
When I started writing the script, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. There were debates about productivity, whether to halt the economy to prevent more elderly people from dying. The pressure to maintain productivity was immense. The aging body became a problem for the economy, but this issue concerns us all because we all have elderly relatives and will eventually have such bodies ourselves. That’s when the idea for a film with dystopian elements came to me: it’s about a populist, growth-oriented Brazil where a government program is launched in the name of productivity, isolating the elderly for the sake of production and economic recovery. Then comes a woman in her seventies who questions the status quo of how the state envisions her end and supposed retirement.
The film critically engages with this utopian government project and the associated propaganda—the euphemism of a "future for all" and the illusion that isolating the elderly from society is the best for everyone, treating them as a living national heritage. It’s a film about a central theme for all of us: aging.
The film also restores a possible sexuality to the protagonist ...
It is primarily a film about a desiring body. This idea has been present in all my films since Boi neon (Neon Bull, 2015). The challenge was to think about this aging body. There is a scene where actor Rodrigo Santoro takes Tereza's face in his hands, and you think a kiss is about to happen. But it’s not the young male body that seduces Tereza; it’s that of Roberta (Miriam Socarrás), an even older boat captain. In her, Tereza finds support, security, ideas for a new life, and has a psychedelic experience. The film plays freely with these experiences, and it is the aging body that undergoes them.
Despite the external dystopian reality, we recognize a great vitality and the inner utopia of the protagonist. Is the film this place of utopia?
If there is a place to dream of possible worlds, it is cinema. Creating spaces of resistance, seeing this body that is under tension in the face of the present, is something that drives me greatly.
Why does this story take place in the Amazon?
The character needed some isolated situations to be able to have her unique experiences. A road movie in a car or truck would not be the suitable form for that. So we decided on the boat. I was already familiar with the Amazon. After my training, I taught courses in audiovisual practice in indigenous communities. After that experience, I already had an idea of the Amazon, and so it ultimately became the ideal place to tell this story. We played a bit with the legends and culture of the Amazon. In the film, there is a factory where crocodile meat is processed. There is a pop culture that appropriates the culture in the form of competitions with fighting fish, where people bet everything they have and don’t have. The beat culture also plays a role. The music is like a being of its own, inviting people to dance. It’s a film that reaches out from the very beginning and says: Shall we dance together?