Fans of “The Secret Agent” breakout Tânia Maria won’t have to wait too long for another delightful performance by the 78-year-old Brazilian rising star. Maria features heavily in Tiago Melo’s “Yellow Cake,” playing as part of the prestigious Tiger Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam eight years after the director won the festival’s Bright Future Award for “Azouge Nazaré.”
Melo’s sophomore effort is a politically charged science fiction set in Picuí, a small town in the drylands of the Brazilian Northeast also known as “Rare Earth” due to its large reserves of radioactive minerals. Such mineral abundance attracts a group of foreign scientists investigating how uranium can help curb the spread of infectious diseases transmitted by the cumbersome Aedes aegypti mosquito, which include dengue and yellow fever. The foreigners’ arrival brings with it great suspicion by the locals, as well as kicking off a series of increasingly odd events.
Speaking with Variety on the ground at the Dutch festival, Melo says he first began working on “Yellow Cake” over a decade ago. The film was inspired by research he conducted for his 2012 short doc “Urânio Picuí,” chronicling the history of how the small town in Pernambuco came to house several American scientists looking to extract uranium to feed experiments conducted during the Manhattan Project in the 1940s.
“The science fiction element of the film came from Picuí itself,” he says. “I have grown up hearing miners tell stories about the rocks in the region, the effect of the radioactive minerals and all the legends and folklore around that very specific kind of energy. I was always fascinated by this type of storytelling.”
As for the prescience of his film’s politics, Melo says he could “never in a million years” have imagined how quickly the film’s portrayal of the future would age in the decade since he first started writing it. “When I started, Dilma Rousseff was still president and no one could ever imagine she would suffer a coup d’etat, but my film already pictured a president tied to the military. The film was about an epidemic and featured people wearing masks… It was crazy because I wrote the story in the future, and it began to feel dated.”
Courtesy of Gilvan Barreto
The director says he also loved the “inherent tension” of having a small Brazilian town be so intricately linked to the U.S. during World War II and major world-shifting events like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “When the war in Iraq broke out, there was a boom in Picuí because the price of minerals shot up, so one place influences the other directly. The rise in global conflicts saw a resurgence of mining as a viable profession, too.”
It’s impossible not to draw comparisons between “Yellow Cake” and “Bacurau,” directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles. Both films are anti-imperialistic genre offerings set in the Brazilian drylands and star Tânia Maria and Alli Willow. Melo, an associate producer in “Bacurau,” is the first to acknowledge the resonance between the two films.
“It was interesting for me to see the representation of the Americans in ‘Bacurau’ because I was already headfirst into research for ‘Yellow Cake’ and looking into the Americans who came to Picuí in the 40s,” he says. “It was like having something that lived for years only in my imagination finally materialized.”
“There is also, of course, a great similarity in how both films tackle imperialism,” goes on the filmmaker. “I wanted to have a very explicit criticism of how today, even after all the advancements we have had as a country and an international player, Brazil — and all emerging countries — are still exploited for raw materials by the U.S.”
“Bacurau”
Photo Cinemascópio
Melo also worked on several other projects by the “Neighboring Sounds” director, including “Aquarius” and some of the director’s earlier short films. Both Mendonça Filho and production partner Emilie Lesclaux (an Oscar nominee this year for their Cannes-winning epic) are associate producers in “Yellow Cake,” with their production label Cinemascópio acting as a co-producer. While giving an in-depth career talk in Rotterdam over the weekend, Filho made a point of recommending Melo’s “terrific” film.
The director emphasizes how vital Mendonça Filho and Lesclaux have been to his career. “They are both very special people to me. I have learned so much about directing from observing Kleber on set. I have also matured as a director, the more I worked with him.”
“I am so grateful to them for believing in my films and for working closely together not only with me but with so many other films coming out of Pernambuco and Brazil,” he goes on. “I find this incredible because it is not only Kleber standing on stage. He brings people with him at every opportunity. It was immensely important to me to have him mention my film during a sold-out event at the festival, and brilliant to all be together here in Rotterdam.”
Asked about the outstanding momentum of Brazilian cinema internationally following the country’s first Oscar win for “I’m Still Here” in 2025, and four Oscar nominations for “The Secret Agent” in 2026, Melo makes a point of saying it is all possible because of Brazil’s audiovisual public policies. “We are still far from an ideal world, but we have had immense advancements in the last decade,” he adds. “As long as public policies are not consolidated, you won’t see diversity on screen, so we need to be constantly discussing this type of support so we don’t stop seeing films like ‘Yellow Cake’ get made.”
“‘Yellow Cake’ is exactly the film I wanted to make, and this was only possible because it was entirely publicly funded,” he goes on. “I am absolutely sure that if I worked with a streaming platform or a major Brazilian distributor, they would want me to change the film, and that would make it lose its authenticity. If we want to continue to see Brazilian cinema succeeding internationally, authenticity is key.”
“Yellow Cake” is produced by Lucinda, Jaraguá and Urânio, and co-produced by Cinemascópio. Urânio Filmes is handling world sales.