Das Gespräch wurde auf Englisch geführt.
Barbara Wurm (BW): Janaína, we’re delighted to welcome you with your feature debut, I BUILT A ROCKET IMAGINING YOUR ARRIVAL, premiering in the Forum section of the Berlinale. The title is wonderfully imaginative, as is the film itself. Before this feature, you made short films, LOS MINUTOS, LAS HORAS (2010) and MADRID (2014). You didn’t make another film in the eleven years between that last short and your debut feature – why?
Janaína Marques (JM): LOS MINUTOS, LAS HORAS was the result of my studies at the International Film and TV School in San Antonio de Los Baños (EICTV) in Cuba. It’s a ten-minute film shot on 35mm, about a mother and daughter, and it premiered at Cinéfondation in Cannes. It travelled to countless festivals around the world and was my first experience of the film market. That was in 2010. With the prizes I won from that film, I was able to make MADRID, shot in Spain. It’s also about motherhood, and about the relationship between a mother and her daughter. It was during that time that I got pregnant and became a mother myself. I was five months pregnant while making MADRID. So, the long gap is related to my own experience of maternity, but I never left cinema. I’ve always worked either as a script supervisor or taught film classes. Cinema has always been my professional life since I left EICTV. Another important reason for the gap is that I come from independent cinema in the Northeast of Brazil, a region with many obstacles to making feature films. I won development grants for projects back in 2015 and 2017, and I am only now able to realise them. So, the gap has personal, social and structural reasons. But it also opened a path for me and gave me something very positive. During this time I became more secure about what I want to do in film, and more decisive when making creative choices. And that’s what led me to this feature, which truly represents what I want to make in cinema today.
BW: When did you begin working on the film, and how did its concept and its rather complex structure develop – a structure which allows a daughter in her mid-fifties, Rosa, to somehow incorporate the life of her mother, Dalva?
JM: The script was born in 2017. I was invited to direct it, and the project went through several development labs and script consultancies. Initially, the narrative was exterior and realistic. The protagonist wasn’t Rosa, but Dalva. In the original version, Dalva, who had been convicted of murder, left prison, kidnapped her estranged daughter, and travelled with her to an asylum, where she planned to reunite with her great love, Consuelo, and travel together, the three of them, to Paraguay. But during the development process, I realised that the protagonist had to be Rosa, a child without her mother. I also understood that the story needed to unfold through a mental code, rather than realism. That shift allowed the film to reach more original and profound layers. It led me to a riskier and freer cinematic form, which then becomes the form of the film.
BW: What about the editing process?
JM: The filmed version of the script originally ran three hours long. In editing, we received further consultancy and understood that the film, being a debut film, needed to be shortened to get into the major film festivals. It was during the editing process that we rewrote the film, together with my editor, Fred Benevides. We edited an hour and a half out of the film. To do that, we had to go to the heart of the film—to its essence, and we needed to make the mental and internal parts much stronger. That’s how we arrived at the film we have today, and we also thought that the title itself had to function as an additional piece of the narrative. Through this process, besides having had a lot of fun, I arrived at a film with a very daring form and the form is the engine of everything. It is a film that encompasses many genres: a road movie, a psychological suspense, a surrealist work, magical realism, even a comedy at moments. And landscape becomes an emotional and mental state of the protagonist.
Through [editing] I arrived at a film with a very daring form and the form is the engine of everything.
What connected me most deeply to the film was the idea of poetry. Poetry doesn’t exist in a linear way. It exists in form, but it moves through entirely free paths. It follows emotional connections rather than informative or didactic ones.
Yun-hua Chen (YC): You mentioned landscapes, which are very important in the film—the dunes, the desert, and a river in which Rosa’s hot-dog cart flows at some point. Could you talk about this particular part of Brazil where the story unfolds?
JM: The landscapes emerged from necessity. As the film unfolds through Rosa’s point of view, I needed a way to represent her internal emotions and states of mind. Landscapes became the best medium to express what she feels. There is the immensity of the dunes, the aridity of the Sertão desert, a sub-region on the northeast of Brazil; the darkness and mystery of the cave; the abundance of the forest where Consuelo lives; the stones along the road. We experience feelings in such ways; some feelings that we carry inside us are vast, some obscure, some abundant enough to nourish us and move us forward, and some are obstacles we must cross. Rosa has to traverse all of them. I live in the state of Ceará, and all the places in the film are here. We filmed entirely in the state, with very limited resources. I see these landscapes constantly, so it was very natural to connect the journey—originally written as a trip to Paraguay, and now an inner journey instead. We shot for 24 days on a budget of $250,000. Even though all locations were in the same state, the logistics of bringing a big team from one side to another were difficult. Consuelo’s house, for example, is on top of a mountain. It was very difficult to reach it. We had to carry all necessary equipment up on foot to create rain for one scene. The film was made during the pandemic, and the team’s commitment was extraordinary. Everyone worked with an intense focus, a kind of collective will.
BW: You said earlier that the editing led you to the core of the film. How would you describe that core?
JM: To answer that, I need to speak about what led me to make this film and which part of myself is passed on to the protagonist. I think, after someone turns forty, there is a very special rite of passage. We begin to allow ourselves to follow our own desires without external interference. When we are born, we inherit many things: customs, beliefs, expectations. We are shaped by all of this, yet no one asks whether we are comfortable with it. We spend years trying to fit into forms that were never made for us.
At around forty, when you feel roughly halfway through life, it’s as if a light goes on. At around forty, when you feel roughly halfway through life, it’s as if a light goes on.
You gain clarity. You start following your own desires without external pressures or prohibitions. You begin a personal journey to understand what is truly yours—what makes sense for you. It’s like a reunion with yourself: a process of reconstruction, reconciliation, acceptance. That’s why I connected with Rosa. I was telling her personal journey. Finding the heart of this journey was easy in this sense, for I had already found that heart in myself. I am the daughter of a single mother. Rosa is not—she has a father. But I understood the intensity of the mother–daughter dynamic. In the film, Rosa’s greatest ally is her mother. Dalva is free, anarchic, transgressive. She lives without asking permission. Rosa, on the other hand, has always tried to live ‘correctly’, inside rigid frames, seeking approval and security. Rosa thus needs her mother to realise this journey completely and transformatively. In the clash between them we see repression versus desire, fear versus courage, guilt versus pleasure. Dalva carries a vital, almost wild force that pushes forward. With that force, Rosa can transform her own life. So the heart of the film lies in the affection between these two women, their will to live, the desire to rescue oneself. It’s a journey of exploration, of rediscovering identity, and it is a deeply therapeutic journey. For me, that is very beautiful and this is where the poetry resides. The healing is what gives you the power to be and live what you desire as a woman.
YC: And this healing is also through memory – a kind of re-imagination and reconstruction of memory. In a way the film follows the logic of memory. Can you talk about this?
JM: When we begin a healing journey, we cross through inhospitable internal landscapes. In the mind, past and imagination dissolve. And in that dissolution, healing becomes present. When Rosa enters the MRI machine, she is asked to think of a happy memory. She is collapsing mentally at that moment, but she clings to this request as if it could propel her into another state. This suggestion becomes the engine of her journey. She begins to imagine experiences she may never have lived with her mother. Yet life is full of mystery, and in that instant she makes those imagined moments real. The desire to live something can be so powerful that it becomes a truth. The journey isn’t just any journey. It’s a necessary journey, because she must overcome trauma; it’s survival instinct.
YC: Towards the end of the film we hear a line from the radio, ‘a spirit is disembodied soul’.Between Rosa and Dalva there is a kind of transformation through disembodiment and re-embodiment. Can you tell us a bit about this ‘disembodied soul’?
JM: As Rosa travels, she reaches deeper layers of herself, and her mother is the main mirror in that transformation. She chooses to take this journey with Dalva, not with anyone else. At each stage, at each deeper layer that Rosa reaches, the film shows her gradually becoming the mother—first through clothes, then hair colour, and finally attitude. More and more, she throws herself into mystery. This can be understood as Rosa surrendering to her mother’s soul, but it is symbolic. It speaks to ancestry: how many people we lose yet are still present within ourselves? The ‘incorporation’ happens in the crossing between Dalva and Rosa. The film marks it with signs—costume, hair, a phrase in the radio.
BW: I find it fascinating how the film shifts direction. At first, one thinks it’s simply a daughter’s story, and then it becomes a poetic re-imagination of the self through another role. The casting highlights this too: Dalva is played by Luciana Souza (who we know from BACURAU [2019, directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles]) and Rosa by Verônica Cavalcanti. The actresses are about the same age, you are blurring the differences; in a way, they resemble each other. Sometimes the mother looks even younger. In addition, Dalva is a person of colour, the daughter is lighter-skinned. When you spoke about the importance of Ceará and a cinema beyond São Paulo, I was wondering, if for you the film also has a post-colonial dimension.
JM: Dalva is a Black woman and Rosa is light-skinned – that is absolutely common in Brazil, where miscegenation shapes families in every possible way. It’s my everyday landscape, and I think it’s important to portray Brazil without fear of that mixture. It’s still very common to see Brazilian films that show only a light-skinned country. I am a mixed-race woman—the daughter of a white mother. But I never felt the need to turn this into a theme. For me, it’s simply what Brazil looks like. Dalva is Rosa’s mother. That’s it.
I was interested in characters whose age is a state of mind, a feeling, rather than a physical marker.
Regarding age, it relates to dissolving past and present. The bodies had to express that. What image do we have of someone we haven’t seen for a long time? What memory do we carry of our mother when she disappears? She can appear with many bodies in the imagination. What mattered was that the bodies never lost tenderness. I was interested in characters whose age is a state of mind, a feeling, rather than a physical marker. In a film built on imagination, delirium and poetry, that dissolution had to exist in their bodies. That’s why Dalva is older yet seems younger than Rosa, and why Rosa is younger yet seems older. Cinema works through images and sensory qualities.
YC: Speaking of sensory qualities, there is a strong use of colours in the mise-en-scène, especially red, from Rosa’s sofa to her scarf.
JM: Colour, for me, belongs to the realm of cinematic artifice. I connect deeply with the cinema of Aki Kaurismäki, with his pictorial minimalism. I think of colour as visual poetry, as something painted on the screen. In this film, red represents a drive for life—the tenderness and vitality present in the story. I wanted that force to exist in the image as well. The film was created during the pandemic, at a time when Brazil was living under an extreme right-wing government, when every day brought news of death and suffering. There was no light and no colour in daily life. Because of that, I made two decisions: first, that I would have fun making this film; second, that spectators would leave feeling good—that the film would end on a high note.
I made two decisions: first, that I would have fun making this film; second, that spectators would leave feeling good
The colours also reflect how Rosa colours her own life throughout the journey. And not just colours, but also symbolic objects that are present in this transformation—like the MRI helmet and, most of all, the rocket, which is the most symbolic of the entire journey.
BW: The film feels uplifting and fun. It’s a feminist film, and in the end it becomes an LGBT empowerment film. All this in the context of Brazil under a right-wing government. What is your attitude toward cinema that touches on these ideas without being explicitly activist?
JM: I always pay more attention to the form than to the narrative. That’s my starting point. But I am a woman. I know what it means to direct a film and lead a crew as a woman. You hear things that would never be said to a male director. Rosa’s sense of guilt is shaped by the feminine, by judgment coming from the male, especially through how people speak about her mother. I didn’t set out to make a feminist film. I gradually discovered the film was feminist during the process. When we cut an hour and a half in the edit, we realised that all the male characters were in the material that was removed. What remained was the story of women. In the editing room, I understood that this is a film about sorority, sisterhood. This is not a film about the symbolic mother within you. It is about the women who are willing to help you along the way—women who, even in adverse situations such as prison or trauma, still desire to love and to live. These women share feelings, and that’s why they unite. Through the film’s form, I realised it also carries a political layer. The film taught me that. I saw I was an ally of Rosa and Dalva. We are all together. It’s a collective journey toward the cosmos—seeking freedom.
BW: That seems like a wonderful way to end our conversation. Our dialogue, too, was sometimes nonlinear, but you helped us reach its poetic heart. And Janaína, it feels like you didn’t just build a rocket—you built a film imagining its arrival in Berlin long before it got here. Thank you.
JM: Thank you for the welcome. It’s a very pleasant feeling for me. And I feel the feminine is very present among us today.
BW: It is—and it will also be present in Berlin. A good space to launch that rocket.
