He was abducted from his home in 1971 by military forces and never seen again by his family.
They are joined in the cast by Selton Mello as Rubens Paiva.
Deadline sat down with Salles the day after the films buzzy premiere in Venice.
Director Walter SallesAFP via Getty Images
This is when he realises at 50, that she had been the real heroine of that family.
Books are generally better than the films.
Who was the blond-haired lady with him?
Walter Salles, Fernanda Torres and Melton Sello embrace Eunice’s Paiva’s children at premiere
SALLES:That was Nalu.
I needed to go to her because she was the source of all of that.
I mean, she brought me to that house.
She was my dear friend and is a dear friend still.
Was that your aim?
What informed us was Eunices way of being in the world.
When she took public photos, she smiled.
The restraint that she has is part of her strength…
DEADLINE:That could have also been to protect the children?
The narration from the loss onwards becomes much more subjective.
Its a family from the loss on, that communicates non-verbally, more than verbally, by looking.
That family that you see in the Super 8 at the end is what that family should have been.
We were at the brink of being such an inventive country.
Culturally, everything was happening correctly in Brazil.
We were developing new forms of public education, new ways of developing land reform.
Thats the beauty of the book.
DEADLINE:You were 14 when all this happened.
Did you ever go back to the house after the Paiva family left?
SALLES:Yes, and I saw the house closed.
And then there was something also traumatic in that it became a restaurant.
And then one day, the house was demolished, and I also saw that.
DEADLINE:This is your first fiction feature film sinceOn The Road12 years ago.
What have you been doing in between?
SALLES:Well, first of all, after a feature, I always go back to documentaries.
Im actually editing a five-hour documentary right now.
its on the converging point between football and politics.
He was one of the players who launched a movement for democracy in a soccer team.
That was unheard of.
He was an extraordinary character.
He was the result of the internal migration in Brazil.
His parents were self-taught public servants.
He had an extraordinary life as a soccer player and was very tragic at the end of the life.
its coming out in the beginning of next year.
Im a slow writer or a slow developer of projects.
I like to allow time to decant things so that Im sure that the projectis theproject to be done.
DEADLINE:Can you say anything about new projectthat more advanced?
Its the story of really large kidnapping that occurred in Argentina, but with political ramifications.
But also, again, its a human story.
Fernando Montenegro taught me many things, but theres one line that I will never forget.
She said, The only way we can be saved are through the human and the existential.
I never thought that it could also be about our present.
Its going to come out in the middle of this moment where Brazilian society is really torn in two.
