Sara Silveira Producer

Her films have been selected in the most important festivals such as Cannes and Venice. She is here at the Festival do Rio with two titles - Os Famosos e os Duendes da Morte (The Famous and the Dead) and Insolação (Sunstroke).

Even thought this independent producer has been in the business since 1993, there’s no symptom of jadedness in her. She still has the same desire to make good movies as she had in the early 90s. Early on it was very hard because she not only had to fight against the theatres that wanted only commercial movies, but also against the president Fernando Collor de Mello, who in that time didn’t support filmmakers. The strange thing is that when a friend told her the idea of creating a new film production company, she didn’t think it was a good idea because she had never done anything related to cinema.

After a few years her work became better-known in the film world. An example of this is the movie La dignidad de los nadie, which won five awards, including three in the Venice. Since then she has developed ten films, several of them with a good reaction from audiences, like El bicho de sete cabecas, which was in theatres for more than four weeks. "I am a producer of auteur movies. I don’t really like to call them artistic movies because it’s kind of too arrogant." This is the way Sara modestly presents her work. To those who would consider her films as ’difficult’, she says "I like making movies that making you wonder, that force you to think about what you just saw." Although I have only watched two of her titles, they were enough to confirm that you should indeed approach her films with an alert mind and your eyes wide open.

However her opinion about commercial films is better than a lot of people would think. For her, these types of movies are necessary because without them the auteur films wouldn’t exist: they both need each other to survive. It’s not even that she dislikes blockbusters, in fact there are a lot of these films on her ’must see’ list. So then why doesn’t she produce some? "Of course if someone proposed to me to make a more commercial movie I would do it. But there is something special about the kind of movies I do. Maybe is the energy that goes with my personality."

Producing in this area of cinema is hard, and if you’re doing it in Brazil it’s even harder. "One thing is to produce a movie, but the really hard thing is to put that movie on in a theatre. As my films are hard to understand it makes it even harder to sell it them audiences." In the sixteen years of experience she has in this business, some of the movies she has made couldn’t ’see the light’. For example there are two short films that she tried to present in the Rio Film Festival, but they weren’t accepted. It isn’t easy sometimes, "because films are [there] for people to watch them", she affirms.

The movies she has produced are completely different from one another. Os Famosos e os Duendes da Morte is very dramatic, a tale about teenagers and their problems. Romantic comedy Elvis and Madonna shows the world of lesbians and transvestites in Rio. "If you ask me how I choose my films… there isn´t any specific request. They just have to be good stories and talk about things that matter." Her voice is so full of life that you are almost hypnotized by it.

After the interview is over and almost off the record, Sara tells me that she is currently working on yet another new project. I think to myself "another new movie? Does this lady ever have a rest?" But as you may already have figured out she loves her work, and when you love what you do there is never enough.

Jorge Robinet