Dreams and courage inspire Brazilian filmmaker Allan Deberton. He tells HFPA journalist Ana Maria Bahiana he would play that he was a movie director when he was a kid. “I was playing with a shoebox as a camera, pretending to be a movie director like Steven Spielberg. I remember the first time I saw E.T. on the big screen and I was baffled.”

The local movie theater closed a long time ago and became a bakery. “For me, the only way to watch movies was on television, we hadn’t even gotten any video stores.”

So dreaming about becoming a filmmaker was something very different from his reality. “I was born in the countryside. I came from a humble family, but I tried and tried and years later after I graduated in accounting and I took a course in economics, I finally decided to move to Rio de Janeiro and studied cinema.”

He produced and shot pictures and a few years later he was ready to start to produce his first feature film as a director, Pacarrete. It was submitted in the non-English category of the Golden Globes and won in several film festivals. “I remember when I saw Pacarrete for the first time. I was riding my bike when I saw her at the town square and she was complaining about some random injustice going on. Everybody said she was crazy and that I should stay away from her.”

The movie is about an aging ballet dancer who wants to perform one more time. “It was after she died that I found out that her name was Pacarrete, which means Daisy in French, so that’s why she liked to wear daisies on her straw hat. I heard she was a ballet dancer and that’s why she liked to sing, she was an art teacher. I kept asking myself whatever happened to her and why people used to say she was crazy? As far as I could tell, she was an artist pushed aside by society. She was someone who never gave up.”

He found similarities between his and Pacarrete’s paths. “As I discovered myself as an artist, trying to take the same step in my hometown, I realized that I was in a similar spot as Pacarrete, resisting, navigating, and persevering. Being an artist is not easy in Brazil. I made this film because I wanted to talk about dreams, about persistence, and not being silent in the face of trouble.”

Listen to the podcast and hear when he first met actress Marcelia Cartaxo, who plays the leading role in Pacarrete and how was it working with her; how Pacarrete is different than other Brazilian movies that take place in Northeast Brazil; what kind of experience he had with his first feature film in film festivals around the world; how his parents reacted when he decided to study cinema; how being an accountant helps him as a filmmaker; why he loves musicals; why he likes producing theatre plays and musicals; which filmmakers inspire him; how he describes the Brazilian film industry at the moment; why was his documentary Transversais censored and how he managed to show it anyway; why adopting his son inspired him to write a screenplay; how he sees the future of Brazilian movies and what is he doing next.