Brazilian Director Gabriel Martins Talks Sundance World Competition Player ‘Mars One’
variety.comJohn Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentSelected for Sundance’s 2022 World Dramatic Competition and winner of Ventana Sur’s $10,000 Paradiso WIP Award, “Mars One” returns Brazil’s Gabriel Martins to to the sense of 2019’s “In the Heart of the World”– of a society yearning for something better, to which it adds a yawning generational gulf.Tércia, for example, dreams of her daughter becoming a dutiful housewife like herself.
So her world is rocked when Eunice moves out of the family home to live with her girlfriend.Father Wellington, a recovering alcoholic, plans his son’s future career as a national soccer star.
But Deivid dreams of become an astrophysicist and part of Mars One, the first manned mission to the Red Planet in 2030. As the months pass, the Martins, a lower-middle class Black family in Contagem, will have to find a way of coping with all the problems of the present while still dreaming of a better future, the synopsis runs.“Mars One” is produced by Filmes de Plástico’s Thiago Macêdo Correia, who’s had four films selected for Cannes, three in Directors’ Fortnight and “The Dead and the Others,” winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard in 2018.Shot with a sense of warmth towards its characters and their setting, “Mars One” begins as the extremist Jair Bolsonoro being voted in as Brazil’s 22nd president.
This sense of a world whose parameters are changing, abandoning old role models and certainties, runs throughout this ambitious film.
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