Sitting at a wonderful rooftop overlooking the sprawling streets of Italy’s Taormina, Oscar-nominated Brazilian actor Fernanda Torres nonetheless can’t fairly imagine she has lastly made it to Sicily. Torres, who’s on the town to obtain the Taormina Film Festival Achievement Award, tells Selection that visiting the area has been a “longtime dream” of hers.
“I am so moved because my family descends from Italy,” she goes on, recalling how her mom, iconic Brazilian actor Fernanda Montenegro, received an award in the identical city in 1978. “Since then, I have always wanted to visit. I have friends who have attended the theater festival, and it always felt like a dream. I had never been to Sicily, so receiving an homage here felt unthinkable.”
Nearly two years since “I’m Still Here” had its world premiere on the Venice Movie Pageant, Torres remains to be reaping the rewards of her main position in Walter Salles’s Oscar-winning drama, which can be being proven on the competition. “I owe a lot of this recognition to ‘I’m Still Here,’ where I play another woman of Italian descent, Eunice Paiva,” she notes.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about this,” Torres continues. “At a time when immigration is such a present issue in the world, both Eunice and I represent this immigration movement that has so deeply changed Brazil, and we are now both, in a way, being recognized here in Italy. I find this to be so beautiful.”
Torres says such an prolonged momentum is “very rare” within the business. “We work our entire lives to have one film like this one. Walter hadn’t made a film in 10 years, so I am so thrilled he returned to cinema for Eunice, for a film that has given such a powerful projection of this incredible woman’s history. It’s a very special film because it united a divided Brazil over human rights and justice. It is a rare film.”
“I’m Still Here,” courtesy of Globoplay
Credit score: Alile Dara Onawale – Globoplay
Yesterday, Brett Goldstein launched a brand new episode of his podcast “Films to Be Buried With,” that includes his “Office Romance” co-star Jennifer Lopez. Within the episode, Lopez cried whereas speaking about watching “I’m Still Here” alongside her household, whereas in the course of her break up from Ben Affleck. The multihyphenate elected “I’m Still Here” when requested by Goldstein: “What’s the film that changed your perspective on something or made you see the world in a new way?”
Lopez stated she got here to the movie at a time when she was “going through a divorce and thinking a lot about my kids.” Watching the movie alongside her household round Christmastime, she added, “healed a part of me that needed to be healed.”
Selection confirmed Torres the shifting clip of Lopez. Whereas watching it, the actor acquired visibly emotional. Because the video reached the top, Torres took a deep breath and easily stated: “Wow. That is so, so moving.”
“This reaction speaks so deeply to Walter’s work,” she provides. “This is a political film, but it is a film about family. It is an archaic story about a mother, left alone with five children to raise. It is a Greek tragedy that goes beyond any political stance, any ideology. Anyone, regardless of where they come from, can understand the foundational idea of family. It’s a sensitivity characteristic of Walter’s work. It’s a human matter.”
The actor recollects first seeing the movie and being overcome with comparable emotion. “It’s hard to explain this aspect of memory. The film so beautifully shows these images you believe to be reality at first and then morph into fragments, shot in Super 8. Cinema has this ability to safeguard, to protect memory.”
“It’s beautiful that a woman like Eunice can represent this to people,” she says of Lopez’s response. “It’s a great honor to have played her and see this continuous impact. It’s very emotional to me.”
As for what’s subsequent, Torres has two tasks lined up: Andrucha Waddington’s “Os Corretores” (“The Brokers” in literal translation), which she additionally wrote, and Bárbara Paz’s “Cuddle,” the place she is going to co-star alongside Willem Dafoe.
Talking about what tasks she is drawn to following the “I’m Still Here” growth, Torres says it took her a whole yr to get better from the “dizzying” competition run and promotional tour for the movie. “‘The Brokers’ was a project that had been sitting in my creative drawer for a little while, and I decided to go for it then. With Bárbara’s film, I am just ecstatic, because I think her documentary about Héctor Babenco (‘Babenco: Tell Me When I Die’) is deeply impressive.”
“[Paz] invited me to tell such an interesting story alongside Willem Dafoe, an artist I have great respect for — and just so happens to live in Italy, so it all feels a bit full circle right now,” she notes. “I feel very happy. I have to confess, it took me a while to come down from the ‘I’m Still Here’ phenomenon, but I feel I’ve done so now.”
