Sabes de mim agora esqueca, You know me, now forget it.

I started thinking about this film in 2015, after an encounter with a sex worker in the bathroom of a bar in Ceilândia. She offered me a job; she wanted someone to replace her. A job offer like any other, which really affected me. I started writing about it, and at first, it was a film that touched more on issues of labor regulation. But there was also the idea of a character with superpowers, which would act as a kind of subjective intervention in the unfolding of the plot. Over time, this second aspect took over the film, and the labor issue became secondary. The country went through a government that destroyed labor rights and brought moral issues to the center of its decisions and oppressions. At the time of making the film, I felt it needed to be centered on the characters’ bodies and their relationship with the space of the brothel and its isolation. I started working on this with the actresses and with Victor de Melo, the Director of Photography. And it was his idea to look at the Toca solely from the inside. The train emerges from accounts that mentioned the prostitution zone during the construction of Brasília as a place “on the other side of the train tracks”. And it didn’t matter for the film what happened between the train and the Toca: it’s as if we were stuck inside it. We shot in a building of a former brothel in Ceilândia, but we only have one shot that shows the city. For the rest, to me, Ceilândia is Margô - and her dialogue with Rúbia about the fountain and about the animal game is a sketch of the city, a city narrated by her, but that we do not see.

This script went through a development stage in a Creative Hub (2016-2017). With the project, I had the time and resources to research and write. I always maintained a more structured scriptwriting process in parallel with a freer one, kept in diaries. With actresses Cida Souza (Margô) and Pietra Sousa (Rúbia), we started meeting 3 months before filming began. The actresses, Ana Laryssa (Assistant Director), and I had weekly meetings where we would turn on the camera and talk about the characters. A little later, we did the same with Aysha Layon (Melina) and the other actresses. And each one had a very particular process, because we used their experiences and desires as a starting point to build the characters. My proposal was that we would improvise the dialogues, and for that, it was necessary to build a deeper relationship with each character so that this spirit could be present with us at the time of filming. I kept writing in parallel - the script and my diaries - although, for the crew, I delivered something closer to a step outline, divided into 3 parts, presented little by little, which kept changing throughout the shoot. My diaries were more of a personal thing. About a month before filming, Renan Rovida (Acting Coach) joined us and stayed throughout the entire shoot. Before every scene, while the crew was getting ready, Renan, Ana Laryssa, and I would go to a room at Toca with the cast and have a conversation about what we were going to film. At that moment, we would pitch an idea of how the dialogues would start, what elements could arise, in terms of content as well as rhythm and mood, but sometimes we would redesign things as the scene unfolded.

I was already coming off a previous project with Cida and Pietra: a short film shot in 2022, not yet released, which also had sex work as its theme. In that short, we started from the archival image that is in the feature film, along with the images of the train tracks. This image is in a 1958 short film, Brasília, capital do século by Gerson Tavares. It is perhaps the only image of sex workers produced during the construction period of Brasília. I started working with Pietra on the idea that she was one of these women, that she had eternal life, that she had lived through all the decades of the city’s existence, and that today she would be taking revenge, making all the men who hired her services disappear. Cida was like a maternal figure, an apparition on the train tracks, but one that linked their past and future. When we started preparing for the feature, we watched the material from the short and started thinking about how these new characters could present themselves now in the space of Toca and the idea that they were no longer allowed to be alone on the street. And also how to build a bond between them based on the need for mutual protection, but also on time travel, life, death, and rebirth, and a communication that happened through a kind of telepathy, an evident need to be together. Pietra is an actress who carries a very powerful gaze, full of mystery, truly a suspense actress. For me and Victor, it was hypnotic to look at her, and we always believed that this gaze would give us many elements of this complexity and mystery that needed to be present in the relationship between the two of them. Cida, on the other hand, was a grounding force for us, the woman from Ceilândia who carries and narrates the history of the city.

I always wanted to shoot the sex scenes in the most unabashed way possible. There was a self-imposed challenge not to resort to the tropes of porn, nor to a certain kind of eroticisation that tries to veil the sex. Victor is a cinematographer who operates a handheld camera brilliantly, and I wanted these scenes to be shot by him that way. With the cast, I always asked about each actress and actor’s willingness for these scenes, and I respected everyone’s desires and boundaries when conceiving the situations. From there, we would propose scenes for each pair. And I always made it very clear that for us anything was possible—whether they wanted to have sex or not, there was a level of involvement that we knew we couldn’t predict. There was a prior, private conversation between them, where they would define what they were going to propose. When the cast stepped onto the set, we would give directions regarding the lighting and the positioning that best favored the presence of their bodies. Most of the time, it was just me, Victor, and Agnes Magalhães (Boom Operator) in the room. Once the scene started, we would follow along and figure things out on the fly. Sometimes we would cut to intervene, sometimes we wouldn’t. It all depended on what we felt pulsating from the scene.

I always saw this film as a fantasy film, with elements of science fiction, but also melodrama. I thought that in this territory I could shift the film away from a certain pretentiousness I saw in films about prostitutes, which try to create a social treatise about this character. I wanted it to be a film full of lust, suspense, and romance, where we had the freedom to propose this clash between the female body and the morality imposed upon it. I think that in our shot breakdown choices, some made during pre-production, others on set, we had this in mind - let’s fantasise in an atmosphere of lust, suspense, and romance. And we designed the scenes according to what the space and the bodies presented to us. Regarding the sound and post-production as a whole, I think we kept to this atmosphere. Of course, some references to other films came up between me and Frederico Benevides (Editor), some suggested by us for Piero Bianchi’s creation of the soundtrack, such as the compositions of John Carpenter and Peter Gabriel, for example. But Piero also used elements from Maíra Romero’s location sound, especially the trains, in building the score. Lucas Coelho’s sound design, along with Letícia Belo’s foley, had the role of isolating the Toca from the city, and all the ambient sounds were built in post-production to make this possible. They did a lot of inventive work in post, so that the Toca would be this dystopian and fantastical place. In the end, Lucas, Piero, and I managed to get together in the mixing studio, which was incredible for the film’s final sound composition.

As I have already mentioned, the image extracted from Brasília, capital do século  was at the beginning of my work with the two protagonists. But this image only resurfaced after a proposal from Frederico to bring Margô’s death to the middle of the film (I had envisioned it closer to the ending). When we found ourselves facing this sort of resurrection of Margô, he urged me to look for images that would make sense to compose this subjective dive before her return. For the train, he proposed the use of large-format images from early cinema, restored by The Eye Museum. What we have is a sequence proposed by him, which uses the movement of the train and the tracking shot on the image of the women, so that Margô returns to the film seeking all her power in the past, tearing down walls and finally sharing her secret with Rúbia.