Grace Passô is a creative fueled by exploring the malleability of form. The actor, director and playwright adapted her own play into her feature debut “Our Secret,” premiering in Berlin seven years after her medium-length film “Dazed Flesh” — also adapted from the stage — played at the same festival.
“Our Secret” is set in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte and follows a Black family struggling to regain their footing following the loss of their patriarch. While the adults bury themselves deeper in a pained silence, the youngest member of the family understands the powerful secret that lies in their household — a secret he yearns to share with his loved ones. When the truth finally comes out, this intimate drama melts into a captivating experiment in genre to explore complex themes of grief and ancestral memory. Watch an exclusive trailer below.
Speaking with Variety ahead of the film’s world premiere, Passô says the family’s story is one that has “followed her for years.” When the time came to direct her first feature film, she knew she wanted to return to the first play she ever wrote and continue to “follow a pattern in my career, where I revisit the work I’ve done on stage on the screen.”
“The story blends intimacy with recurring themes in my career as well,” she goes on. “It mixes realism with surrealism and happens inside the intimate world of a family. This film was born out of a longtime desire to direct a feature and also out of my partnership with my producer, Ricardo [Alves Jr.]. We worked very hard together to find the resources to make it happen and we were both deeply invested in the film and the story we wanted to tell.”
As for the differences between broaching this tale of grief on stage versus the screen, the creative says “the artform you choose to tell a story tells a lot about what you want to say.”
“A song is different from a book, which is different from a play,” she adds. “Experiencing the idea of love through these different formats brings different emotions within you. What I am interested in is understanding how to engage an audience’s sensibility through different formats. I’ve always been drawn to the creative aspects of directing.”
Despite not necessarily being a large ensemble piece and taking place mostly within the family house, casting was a lengthy and essential process to make “Our Secret” happen, particularly because Passô felt the film heavily relied on the audience believing the intimacy of the family we see on screen. The toughest piece of the puzzle, says the director, was finding the child who plays Tutu. The role ultimately went to newcomer Efraim Santos.
“Originally, I wrote the role for a girl around age seven, and had a whole auditioning process around that description,” she says. “It’s very common in auditions to be surprised by the children you encounter because most of them are acting for the very first time and what they do is often unexpected. It’s very special to be there to witness a child meeting the idea of cinema for the first time. Efraim didn’t match the characteristics I originally wanted for the role, but he was so interesting and I fell in love with his audition.”
The recent international success of films like Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent” and Gabriel Mascaro’s Silver Bear-winning “The Blue Trail” reflects a strong moment of decentralization for Brazilian cinema. Despite the country’s Northeast having a great filmmaking legacy coming from the days of Cinema Novo, over the last two decades, most major Brazilian production companies have been based in Rio and São Paulo, with the country’s audiovisual output often reflecting this geographical imbalance. “Our Secret” is entirely shot in the Minas Gerais capital of Belo Horizonte, where Passô is from.
“Our Secret,” courtesy of © entrefilms / Wilssa Esser
“The struggle of every culture is to overcome its own stereotypes,” observes the director when reflecting on this moment. “Obviously, Brazil is seen through several stereotypes abroad, but our country is continental. Our culture is very diverse. It is hugely important that Brazil is seen in its real size and dimension on screen, not only so we can create a more honest portrayal of our country abroad, but also to further strengthen our national industry. Brazil is much bigger than Rio and São Paulo.”
Still on the subject of breaking stereotypes, Passô emphasizes how interested she is in perceiving “Our Secret” as part of “stories that introduce a new dimension to Black Brazilian lives on screen.”
“We know very well that one of the greatest feats of Black cinema internationally is how it has overcome certain stereotypes around Blackness,” she adds. “There is this tradition of Black stories being associated with tragedy, or seeing Black people as these mythical, all-knowing beings that are there to teach the world how to destroy racism. I did not want to associate this family with either tragedy or teaching. I am not interested in teaching people undergoing a journey of racial literacy how not to be racist. And having the freedom to do that is one of the greatest contributions of Black cinema in recent times.”
With her film, Passô wanted to “rescue Black memories generally and within me.” Every moment of human grief has that point where you don’t know how to express the dimension of what is happening, of what death represents in our lives. Having a family undergo that together and wrestle with this silence that lingered between them was an attempt at humanizing this story and allowing me to portray Black characters not as teachers guiding the audience through the stages of grief, nor people directly tied to suffering and punished by it. I wanted to make our experiences plural.”
“Our Secret” is produced by Entrefilmes in co-production with Desvia, Globo Filmes, Quarta-Feira Filmes, Foi Bonita a Festa and Producões Grãos da Imagem. The Open Reel handles world sales.