Premieres this Thursday (25th) “No! Do not look!” feature film Jordan Peele director of “Run!” (2017), “We” (2019), and the first black man to win an Oscar for best screenplay, in 2018.
Coincidentally, it also debuts today.”Mars One” miner movie Gabriel Martins, which won the awards for best screenplay, best musical score, best feature (popular jury) and the special award at the 50th Gramado Film Festival which took place last Saturday.
In addition to the premiere dates, the features reserve one more peculiarity among themselves: they are films idealized, scripted, directed and starring black people. But in relation to this theme, however, there is no mere coincidence. Cinema conceived and starring blacks has been occupying important spaces worldwide.
“It is very strong to think that on the same day there will be a Brazilian film that greatly enhances this place, and an American film by a director who affirms his raciality on the screen.”, says the director of “Mars Um”, Gabriel Martins, in an exclusive interview with CNN. And the blackness on canvas could be a key to a shift in how the black population is seen and portrayed – in and out of theaters.
This is because both in “Mars One” and in “No! Don’t Look!”, black people are protagonists and are complex characters: they are not extras or the first to die. They are characters with their own names, surnames, ideas and trajectories. And that changes a main point in the fight against racism and prejudice: the end of stereotypes and an idea of subordination.
“It is important that we talk about how entertainment was responsible for propagating stereotypes. We have a past with this that also culminated in the removal of black people from the entertainment market as creators“, it says Ale Santos writer, screenwriter and finalist for the 2020 Jabuti award for his Afrofuturist work “The Last Ancestor”. “And today, when we see a new black director, a new narrative, we are humanizing black figures, not only as characters, but also as creators.” .
In the end, the whole society wins. It gains new stories, it gains new heroes to imagine, it gains new narratives to discuss, narratives that are productive for the whole society.
Alê Santos, writer and screenwriter
If in “Run!” the actor’s character Daniel Kaluuya lives the terror of having to meet the family of his white girlfriend, in “No! Don’t Look!”, the same Kaluuya, along with the character of actress Kiki Palmer, own a famous ranch in California and have to deal with strange supernatural events. In “Marte Um”, Gabriel Martins goes further and proposes to a black and peripheral family who dare to dream . In the plot, Deivinho (played by Cicero Lucas) is a football star boy, but he dreams bigger: he wants to be an astrophysicist and participate in the Mars One mission, which plans to colonize the Red Planet in 2030.
And Peele’s suspense stories meet in the same place as Martins’s: they take black people and black culture to unusual scenarios, be they a spaceship or the post of Brazil’s next great astrophysicist – places totally unimaginable and denied to the population. black until recently.
“When we have new creators of new narratives, new black characters in this Imaginary space, we are also shaping the future of the country”, adds Ale Santos. “We are inspiring people to imagine that they too can be super scientists. We are normalizing and making society understand that it is normal for a black woman to be a person who managed to do the sequencing of the Covid-19 genome, for example.”
When we propagate unrealistic stories with these powerful figures, we help to normalize in everyone’s mind that a black person has no limits, they can be whatever they want, they can have the production they want to produce.
Alê Santos, writer and screenwriter
And thinking in this way, in addition to contributing to the end of racism and a dynamic of inferiority, proposes an idea of a society in which it is possible to live any adventures, dream and achieve, regardless of gender, race or sexual orientation.
This is the key, for me, of this renewal that Brazilian cinema is going through and needs to go through. It is for us to make the characters more complex, for us to expand the possible visions that we can have of groups that are part of Brazil. We want to tell stories of people who are like the characters from Mars One: who are ordinary families, including renewing this way of existing as blackness on screen.
Gabriel Martins, director and screenwriter of Marte Um
Source: CNN Brasil
