Vera Egito

Telling small stories with big themes, Brazilian Vera Egito will be the first director to open and close the Critics’ Week at Cannes

One day, a friend of Vera’s told her that, as a teenager, she used to smoke almost naked in the stairway of her building, so that her parents wouldn’t find it out by the smell on her clothes. The cinema student had this idea in mind for days, until she decided it would be the starting point for her short film at the University of São Paulo.

In Espalhadas pelo Ar (Spread through the Air), the destiny of a 14-year-old girl experiencing her first love crosses that of a 30-year-old woman on the verge of ending her marriage. They meet each other on the stairway and become friends, helping each other without noticing it.

The film took part in ten festivals and won the French Critic’s Discovery award in the School Cinema Festival of Poitiers – not bad for a 24-year-old student’s first short-film made without pretension. But the best was still to come: with Spread, Vera received a first-time double invitation for the Critics’ Week in Cannes this year. While Spread will close the event, her new short, Elo (Bond), will be screened for the opening of one of the most prestigious parallel events in Cannes.

In Bond, Vera shows another feminine fate-crossing: at the beginning of the 80s, a girl meets with her first romantic disappointment on the same day that her mother learns the death of her favorite Brazilian singer, Elis Regina.

Her taste for “small stories” is not casual. “I learned from my father, an advertising photographer, to see the world in small rectangles, select what we really want to see. (Argentinean poet Jorge Luís) Borges once said: if you understand a rose, you will understand the whole world”, she says.

Intelligent and expressive, Vera goes against the tide when the subject is her work. With all these female characters, does she defend a “feminine cinema”? “I can discuss the concept, but I can’t help doubting it. A man, Fellini, created Cabiria, a woman who learns to forgive herself, in the most feminine trajectory in cinema”, she strikes.

Are there many prejudices against female directors? “I see a problem: when a man director is rough on the set, he’s seen as a competent moviemaker. When a woman is rigid in the set, she’s seen as hysterical. We are raised to be sweet and tender, but a girl should never be ashamed of commanding her team. Mostly, the set is a moment of war for any director”, Vera is not afraid to say.

Oddly, for a girl with films in Cannes, Vera does not raise the flag of art movies. “We have to learn how to make commercial cinema. There has got to be something special in a film that is liked both by a grandma and her grandson”, she defends. Another surprise: she’s not a big fan of Brazilian cinema - not a single Brazilian director comes to her mind as an influence. When asked for her favorites, she mentions Sofia Coppola, Michael Mann, Wong Kar-Wai (“especially My Blueberry Nights, which critics love to hate”) and Argentinean Lucrecia Martel.

For the future, Vera is already post-producing her third short, 25. Unlike her former films, this one portrays a boy, the son of a Chinese-immigrant family in São Paulo whose father sells illegal DVDs in the street 25 de Março, the temple of illegal commerce in the city. She claims she is not anxious about shooting her first long-feature film. “But it’s like moving out to live with your boyfriend: I’m feeling a lot of pressure to know when the baby is gonna come”, she jokes.

In a way, however, Vera will also be in Cannes with a long-feature film: she has collaborated on the screenplay of À Deriva (Adrift), directed by her boyfriend Heitor Dhalia, which is selected for Un Certain Regard. “I’m very anxious about Cannes. Showing your film to an audience is like being naked in front of dressed people. And obviously, there’s always a certain fear that your films may be ran over by the festival’s rush. But I couldn’t feel happier right now”. For a girl used to seeing the world in small rectangles, at the moment Vera’s focus couldn’t be more enlarged.

Thiago Stivaletti