IFFI 2025: Director Gabriel Mascuro on ‘The Blue Trail’ and how Goa influenced his Brazilian festival opener

Brazilian filmmaker Gabriel Mascaro arrived successful Goa this week for the 56th International Film Festival of India, wherever his latest diagnostic The Blue Trail was screened arsenic the opener, aft a year-long tally crossed large festivals. Known for his assemblage of enactment that folds societal texture into an inventive form, the manager was present to sermon wherefore helium built a dystopian roadworthy communicative astir a 77-year-old protagonist, and however Brazil’s governmental clime shaped the film’s imagined future. Speaking astatine his festival Q&A, helium outlines however helium approached the worldly and what drew him to Goa astatine this infinitesimal successful the movie’s life.

The Blue Trail follows Tereza, who flees the state’s aged relocation programme to prosecute a long-delayed dream, played by the flinty Brazilian signifier veteran, Denise Weinberg. Mascaro recalls a riff connected the accustomed cinematic wont of linking property to nostalgia. He says his starting constituent was intimate and immediate: his grandmother. “She’s 97 now, but erstwhile she was 80 years old, she started coating erstwhile my grandpa had conscionable passed. I was precise inspired by idiosyncratic successful the precocious 80s who could restart and make a caller meaning for her life.”

From that little and factual anecdote, helium draws a corrective insistence that aged characters inhabit the contiguous and not lone the past, which determines the film’s ceremonial gamble. Mascaro wanted an older protagonist to inhabit genres that usually exclude them. “Normally, we ne'er deliberation astir the aged being portion of this,” helium says. “So that’s wherefore I projected to marque this movie blending dystopia, roadworthy movie, coming of age; each the genres that bash not judge the elderly.” The movie ends up dressing those acquainted genre trappings successful the unexpected tegument of clandestine vessel voyages and a hunt for state arsenic urgent arsenic immoderate teen quest.

The thought of state and liberation is the film’s guiding light. “It was precise important for maine to commencement reasoning astir the aged arsenic capable radical susceptible of rediscovering the present, discovering themselves, starting to spot a caller meaning for life, and susceptible of having pleasure.” He refrains from sentimentalising Tereza’s arc, and the scenes that probe her desire, sexuality and risk, bash truthful to dislodge a taste wont that has domesticated aged bodies into memories.

Those originative choices beryllium against a governmental backdrop Mascaro calls peculiarly raw. He refers to caller Brazilian years arsenic a “second pandemic” beside COVID: “We had the pandemic, and we person our government, led by [Jair] Bolsonaro. It was the equivalent of different pandemic.” He describes Brazil’s taste aftershocks of backing freezes and administrative dismantling of taste institutions arsenic worldly that pushed him toward a speculative fabrication that could registry arsenic plausible. “It’s much astir a suspended world that deals with thing that we tin recognise. We deliberation it could beryllium real, but it’s not. But the feelings are inactive real.”

The film’s tiny surrealities — the titular psychotropic bluish snail slime among them — grew from respect for section ritual and an ethic of invention. “You tin find a batch of equivalents that are for real,” says Mascaro, naming ayahuasca and different vegetal medicines, but adding: “I similar to make by fabrication my ain allegory to correspond and speech astir psychotropics.” The bluish snail goo successful the movie functions arsenic an allegory to research revelation and altered position without appropriating ineffable practices.

Mascaro besides mentions however ocular and taste notes from his clip successful Goa filtered into the film’s invented spaces and reinforced an unexpected kinship betwixt the 2 Lusophone regions. He had been reasoning astir the Amazon erstwhile elements he’d observed successful Goa suggested mise-en-scène possibilities and sartorial choices similar the sharply tailored tropical constabulary uniforms. “I was precise obsessed with the casinos, due to the fact that you don’t person that civilization successful Brazil, and it worked precise good for the movie.” He describes however the likes of the floating Majestic Club casino connected the Mandovi River successful Goa influenced the Golden Fish, a fish-fighting pit, successful his film. “It was precise inspiring to beryllium here,” helium adds, calling the brushwood a unusual originative coincidence that aboriginal looped backmost into becoming IFFI’s opening film.

On representation, peculiarly of Amazonian and Indigenous cultures, Mascaro acknowledges limits and responsibilities. “It wasn’t needfully a movie astir Indigenous people; it was astir an aged subject,” helium says. Even so, the Amazon’s taste value shaped the production. More than 20 actors and unit members came from the region’s theatre community, which is simply a prime helium describes arsenic some applicable and ethical. “When you speech astir the Amazon region, determination is simply a immense request for representation,” helium explains. “Hopefully, much and much films tin travel from that region, directed by radical from that region.”