DIRECTOR STATEMENT

Moving from São Paulo to New York transformed not only where I lived, but how I understood my own identity. While studying film in the United States, I began questioning why America had always represented success to me, and how deeply American media had shaped my imagination. Reconnecting with Brazilian cinema ultimately led me back to my own culture and inspired São Paulo, New York. By the time I graduated, I carried a renewed conviction in my Brazilian identity and a purpose as a filmmaker: to tell stories through a distinctly Brazilian-American lens.

The film is an autobiographical exploration of belonging, migration, and the search for cultural identity between Brazil and the United States. Through two parallel timelines, it asks what happens when the place you've dreamed of finally asks you to leave and whether home can become something you learn to see again.

I wanted the film itself to exist between two worlds. Shot across Brazil and the United States with two entirely separate crews, it draws from both Brazilian and American cinematic traditions, juxtaposing cities, musical genres, and ways of life to explore how culture shapes identity. Rather than offering easy answers, the film asks how our ideas of success are formed and what it means to redefine them on our own terms.

Playing Felipe was central to that process. As both director and actor, I was able to confront my own uncertainty as an international student living on borrowed time, facing many of the same bureaucratic questions as the character. Performing the role became a way of processing an experience I was still living, transforming the film into both an artistic statement and a personal attempt to redefine what success and home could mean.