Gabriel Martins' Netflix Drama Premieres at TIFF — SkimNews
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- Gabriel Martins world premiered "On Behalf of My Son" in the Platform section of the Toronto Film Festival, four years after his Sundance-debut "Mars One," which made him the first Black director chosen by Brazil for the Oscars.
- Netflix joined the production with what Martins calls a "much more robust budget," enabling the decade-old project to move forward; Higia Ikeda, director of films at Netflix Brazil, called the film "a true testament to how sophisticated and diverse Brazilian cinema has become."
- Rejane Faria stars as Vicentina, the mother of a bus driver who apparently killed himself and dozens of passengers in a planned suicide crash; the character contacts victims' families to apologize on behalf of her son.
- The ensemble cast — Maíra Azevedo, Renato Novaes, Karine Telles, Giovanna Heliodoro, Thalma de Freitas, and Grace Passô — is a large Black ensemble Martins personally assembled, a process he says "makes him the happiest" about the project.
- Faria, reuniting with Martins after 2013 short "Quinze" and "Mars One," told Variety she "became a completely different person" for the role, citing the heavy makeup and altered body language required.
- "On Behalf of My Son" opens in select cinemas on November 5 and arrives on Netflix November 20.
- Martins casts the film in a country with the world's second-largest Black population outside Africa, noting that his filmmaking "involves wanting to see a better world, and that goes through directing people's gaze to these stories."
Why it matters: Coming out of a Brazilian cinema landscape battered by pandemic shutdowns and Bolsonaro-era cultural budget cuts, Netflix's financing gave Martins the resources to deliver a project he'd been trying to make for roughly a decade. With the film reaching Netflix globally on November 20, it gives a director who broke a national barrier at the Oscars a major platform to showcase a Black Brazilian ensemble — a demographic still underrepresented on screen in the country with the largest Black population outside Africa.
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