AN IDEAL OF LIBERTY

•    As a kid, my grandfather showed me hundreds of westerns while growing up. His collection of films varied from High Noon, Once upon a time in the West, to Django. His passion for the western genre is one of the reasons he and I love films today. Any film we watched would always be compared to some western he loved. But, in those westerns, something was off, and the more we watched westerns, the historical inaccuracies became clearer with time.
•    When I moved to the US, one of the first classes I had in college, was American History. In it, we had a lecture on slavery in America that was about 30 minutes long, in the entire semester, which was odd, giving the extent in which it happened in this country.  The longer I lived here, the longer I noticed the lack of details on one of the darkest eras in history, but an era that still has consequences until today. It felt as if the country itself didn’t want to talk about it. But to forget is to repeat our actions. The more I talked to people here in the U.S, the more they confirmed me, that the topic was very briefly talked about in high school and even in colleges. Almost considered taboo.
•    My grandfather is Colombian and has suffered racism in Brazil, because of his language and the color of his skin. We would walk in my hometown, Sao Paulo, since I was little, and even inside an extremely mixed country, racism and xenophobia still exist. From an early age, discrimination was shown to him in a country where most people in America can’t distinguish language tonalities coming from Colombia and Brazil, Spanish and Portuguese…
•    I became a filmmaker because I wanted to tell unforgettable powerful stories, without being afraid of themes, demonstrating more of my art to inspire new filmmakers. As an Immigrant in the United States and being Caucasian, I cannot say that I can talk on behalf of the African American Culture, but something that I can do is be brave and tell a story where people are afraid to tackle issues and eras such as this one. And as Sidney Poitier, director of the first Black Western Film, told Quentin Tarantino over dinner, when Tarantino was having trepidations over Django: “Man up. It sounds like you are afraid of your own movie, and you shouldn’t be”. Because if you are afraid to talk about moments like this in history… How long until we repeat it?