Postcard from Rio

Interview with Felipe Casanova

Felipe Casanova spent the first nine years of his life in Brazil’s carnival capital Rio de Janeiro before moving to Switzerland, but his heart has always belonged to Brazil. Moreso, his country of birth kept pulling him back, summoning his creative impulses. “You know that moment where your brain starts absorbing everything around it like a sponge, becoming inspired to create?” the director asks me over a fuzzy Zoom connection. “For me, that was in Brazil.”

Casanova, who is now based in Belgium, graduated from the prestigious Institut des Arts de Diffusion (IAD) in 2021 with a master’s degree in film directing, but admits he felt restricted by the “old-school” style of filmmaking that prioritised elaborate productions over artistic experimentation. As a result, he honed a more independent creative process that didn’t require a sizable production to make his debut film, Loveboard (2023). Using glitchy video calls to evoke the digital archive of once-coveted memories stored on a broken smartphone, Casanova’s first short is a touching meditation on the remnants of a love that has faded away, underscoring his overarching interest in preserving the fragility of relationships on film.

For his latest project, he decided to explore his hometown at the height of its popularity during the Carnival. Equipped with a Super-8 camera and a vague story outline about a working mother looking for her son, he set off to make O Rio de Janeiro continua lindo, which won Best Documentary at Clermont-Ferrand’s Lab Competition in February 2026. Inspired by the grainy melancholia of Chantal Akerman’s News From Home (1976) and the nocturnal vagabondism of Bas Devos’ Ghost Tropic (2019), Casanova’s second docufiction short uses a mother’s letter to her absent son during the height of the carnival as its narrative point of departure to tell a fragmentary yet intimate story of familial love, grounded in a political present and suspended in time. By reframing the celebratory upheaval of the carnival as a space for communal resistance against state violence, O Rio de Janeiro continua lindo explores themes that have become a mainstay of contemporary Brazilian cinema: memorial archives preserved in celluloid and the ghosts of the not-so-distant past that continue to haunt the present.

In our hour-long conversation, we talked about the importance of making political cinema that remembers, the creative advantages of blurring the line between reality and fiction, and the revolutionary potential of partying.

Can you tell me how you came up with the initial idea for the film?
It started from very little. I just took my [Super 8] camera to the carnival, thinking, okay, I want to make a film. My previous film Loveboard was composed of an exchange of messages and voice notes between a couple in the midst of a break-up. This time around, I wanted to make a film about a written correspondence between a mother and her son. So, I thought of a mother working at the carnival and writing to her absent son. When I got to Rio, I noticed all these drink sellers everywhere and how essential they are to the carnival as a whole, and that’s how I met Ilma, the film’s protagonist. We got along, and the rest is history.

Your film situates the correspondence between mother and son within the post-Bolsonaro Brazilian political context, through an explicit critique of the systemic police violence against Black people. Since you like to work without a script, were these political themes something you wanted to explore from the outset?
I knew the film was going to be political because of the initial idea of a working mother as the main character who has a totally different experience in the carnival than the people who are partying. I thought I would centre the film around this dynamic. My initial narrative concept still exists in the film, but I didn’t expect to talk about police brutality. I started thinking about incorporating these systemic issues when I met Ilma, a drink seller at the carnival, who introduced me to the widespread problem of state-backed violence against Black people. The film also has a hybrid aspect to it… I don’t know if we should already go into that.

How did you go about fictionalising the lived experiences of the women you talked to in your film?
When I met Ilma, who plays the mother in the film, I was interested in her relationship with her son. Then, she introduced me to Bruna—another drink seller at the carnival, who had lost her son to police violence. She, in turn, told me her whole life story and showed me the letters she was writing to her own son as a way of coping with the loss. Through Bruna, I learned about this association for mothers of victims of police violence in Rio, where they would write letters to the children they had lost as a form of grief therapy, and also organise protests to raise awareness about the victims of police violence.

There is a very poignant scene towards the end of the film, where Ilma dances on a float during the carnival parade. Was this also directly inspired by your conversations?
When I met Bruna, she had just taken part in the parade on a float organised by Portela, a traditional samba school in Brazil. Samba, as a genre of dance and music, has this sadness to it, which is very much tied to its colonial history. And so Portela’s float was inspired by a Brazilian novel called A Defeito de Cor, which tells the story of an enslaved African woman in Brazil who loses her son. The story was inspired by true events, and in keeping with its enduring relevance, Portela invited sixteen mothers who had lost their sons to police violence to partake in the parade and dance on the float, which I got to see in person. And the moment I saw it, I said to myself, “This is the film I’m making.” It really moved me, so I composed the story around these themes and visuals.

O Rio de Janeiro continua lindo (Felipe Casanova, 2025)

In composing a narrative around these real-life stories, your film toes the line between documentary and fiction to the point where it becomes hard for the viewer to tell where Ilma and Bruna’s stories end, and yours begins. Why did you choose to keep this distinction between what’s real and what’s fictionalised blurry?
I think it’s Kleber [Mendonça Filho, director of the Oscar-nominated feature film The Secret Agent] who said that the most beautiful documentaries are actually fiction. I like this idea, because when you think about it, [just like documentary] fiction also has a way of preserving imagery, a particular state of mind or time. So, I don’t buy into the notion of separating documentary and fiction. In the end, I’m not very interested in putting my film in a specific category. I like working in a hybrid way.

Would you say that this hybridity helped you maintain a certain ethical distance from the racially sensitive subject matter?
Well, it’s because of ethical reasons that I didn’t want to include an actual letter written by someone’s son. On the one hand, the ‘real’ letters I read were very specific to the cases of the people they were addressed to, and I wanted them to say more than that. But on the other hand, Bruna and the other mothers told me a lot of things that they wouldn’t have told their sons. So I decided the best way to approach this paradox was to have Ilma read a fictional letter, so she could carry the voices of all the mothers I talked to. Fictionalising the letter gave me a lot of freedom to write and construct it from scratch because it had to contain a lot of things. It’s a letter from a mother to her son, but it’s also a letter to society in a way, to explain this whole injustice and brutality [of racist state violence]. So it’s one voice that becomes many.

Watching your film, I also had to think back to the recent crop of Brazilian films like Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here (2024) and Filho’s The Secret Agent (2025), which also have this common thread of trying to preserve collective memory through archival work in an attempt to undo the historical revisionism of the fascist Bolsonaro regime.
Yes, memory is something that I have always been a bit obsessed with. Maybe it’s because I’m a Cancer and we are very nostalgic. [laughs] I have some trouble with [processing] the time passing. As human beings, we don’t understand time very well. There’s something mysterious and existential about it. Kleber and Walter’s films are amazing because they take the memory and they put it in a political context. Brazil’s military dictatorship was a very dark period with a lot of gaps in the history, because a lot happened without people knowing, like kidnappings or murders, and this created an attachment to how important it is to have a record of something. I think my film also approaches that, but in a more poetic way, more in the vein of an intimate feeling. It’s also a bit more about the ghosts of our past, of Brazilian society and history. I revive the ghosts of the military dictatorship [through archival footage], because I think the police violence comes from that specific time and its impunity.

To go back to the film’s setting: What part would you say the carnival plays in the film’s political messaging?
Historically, carnival marks the moment where people take the party to the streets, dressing up however they want. It’s liberty—very beautiful and powerful. We live in dark times, where fascism is on the rise and the rich and the elite have so much power. Set against this backdrop, I think framing communal celebrations as a form of revolt against the established system is very powerful. My next film also has a bit of this idea of the party as a revolution. Very recently, Bad Bunny set a very good example at the Super Bowl; he wasn’t attacking the enemy, he was creating a homage to his identity, to his culture, in a big party with lots of love. That is such a strong thing to do, because then you’re not playing ‘the game’. It’s very hard to live in Brazil, but people still keep smiling. It’s very Brazilian, this joy, which you can also find in the music. For example, the Bloco Afro drummers from Olodum, who are in my film, captivated me with the revolt I recognised in the way they were performing. It was very intuitive [for me] to mix all these portraits of different people as they mix during Carnival time. The beauty of political art as a gesture of revolt really brings me to tears.