During the latest edition of Qumra (3-9 April), the Doha Film Institute hosted a riveting master class with Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles, held at the atmospheric Museum of Islamic Art on 4 April. Moderated by film professor and critic Richard Peña, the session offered a rich, intimate dialogue that traced Salles’ career, artistic philosophy and enduring commitment to portraying the human condition on screen.

Peña opened the discussion by celebrating Salles’ gift for “capturing the human”, comparing his cinema to Béla Balázs’s concept of the “landscape of faces”. That emotional resonance, Peña suggested, lies at the heart of Salles’ body of work.

Asked how cinema first entered his life, Salles spoke first of his initial love for photography, deeply inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson. “Cartier-Bresson never shot an image without feeling invited to do so,” he recalled. The French photographer’s habit of leaving his camera behind when visiting unfamiliar communities – choosing first to understand and immerse himself – left a lasting impression. “There’s something utterly extraordinary in that,” said Salles.

Cinema became a refuge when, as a young man, he had to leave Brazil and move to Paris. Feeling dislocated and melancholic, he found solace in Neorealism and Nouvelle Vague films. “The only place where I found something truly inspiring was cinema,” he explained. Among the many films that shaped his vision, The Passenger by Michelangelo Antonioni stood out: “It’s not just about the loss of identity, but also about the interrogation of the self.”

Peña steered the conversation towards the turbulent political backdrop of Salles’ youth. Before Brazil’s military coup in 1964, he noted, there was an artistic movement filled with optimism—architecture by Lúcio Costa, bossa nova music embracing “dissonance”, and Cinema Novo, which sought to represent the country’s “human geography”. Salles lamented the rupture caused by dictatorship, yet insisted that “dictatorship can eliminate everything but ideas”. Some of those ideas, he noted, “survived more in music than in cinema”.

Though Salles later studied in California, he credited his real education to the Brazilian directors of Cinema Novo, particularly Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and his own work in documentary filmmaking. “I’m part of a generation who picked up cameras hoping to return to democracy,” he noted. This political and social awareness permeates his 1995 feature Foreign Land, which Salles made after Brazil’s first democratic elections in over two decades. Ironically, that new chapter brought more chaos under President Fernando Collor de Mello. “Around 800,000 people fled the country, mostly youngsters,” Salles recalled. His film followed four of them as they emigrated to Portugal, shot in just three weeks across three continents. “It was ignited by urgency and improvisation,” he said, drawing comparisons to early Wim Wenders. “We wrote as we shot, in chronological order.”

Improvisation remains central to his craft. “If you have something crystallised, it’s easier to improvise – like jazz,” Salles explained. This approach continued in his breakthrough Central Station (1998). The idea stemmed from a documentary that he made about correspondence between a Polish sculptor working on burnt wood in the Amazon Rainforest and a Brazilian woman in prison – both seeking a new beginning. In Central Station, that story evolved into one of a woman writing letters on behalf of the illiterate in “pre-digital Brazil”.

Shot in a bustling train station where over 300,000 people passed through daily, the film blended fiction and reality. “About 25%-30% of the letters are ours, performed by actors. The rest came from non-professional actors whom we invited into the scene,” he revealed. This authenticity contributed to Fernanda Montenegro’s Oscar-nominated performance as the picture’s protagonist.

When it comes to directing, Salles prefers to avoid storyboarding. “I hate it,” he admitted with a smile. “I never do too many takes and never allow a second take to resemble the first. I’ll whisper something to one actor just to see how the other reacts differently.” He cited Aki Kaurismäki’s disdain for Steadicams with amusement, admiring the Finnish director’s use of formal structure only to subvert it.

Visual and emotional tension, he said, emerge from what remains unsaid or unseen. “What you don’t show is sometimes more informative than what you do.” Salles and his DoP carefully consider lenses, movement and especially “what should be sensed”. Quoting Jean-Luc Godard, he added: “When you see everything, that’s television. When you’re invited to ‘complete’ the image, that’s cinema.”

The conversation turned to The Motorcycle Diaries [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] (2004), Salles’ celebrated adaptation of Che Guevara’s youthful travelogue. Initially hesitant to direct – “I’m not from that part of the world; I don’t speak Spanish” – he visited Cuba and received encouragement from Guevara’s travelling companion, Alberto Granado. The team also had to face nature’s whims: “On the first day of summer in Patagonia, it snowed heavily. It was wonderful.”

The Patagonian shoot was minimalist – just eight people, with four to five minutes of script captured in 24 hours. “Everything was built by the actors,” said Salles. “Cinema’s collectiveness is our strongest ally – the capacity to embrace the elements, the unexpected.”

Salles concluded with some reflections on I’m Still Here [+leggi anche:
recensione
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scheda film]. The film explores memory, politics and family through a semi-autobiographical lens, based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s novel of the same name. Salles had witnessed the original story as a teenager, visiting a family in Rio who lived with extraordinary openness during the dictatorship. “There were always 30 people coming in and out, the windows were open, and the door had no key,” he said. “They lived like that as a form of resistance.”

One sequence shown during the session depicts the moment when militiamen enter the family’s home to arrest Rubens Paiva. “It’s the last moment when life can continue as normal,” he said. As the curtains are drawn and records are no longer placed on the turntable, “light, music and dialogue are taken away. Without democracy, you can’t speak openly. The film becomes about the presence of absence.” Every frame, he added, carries that absence. “There’s always an empty space. You sense that someone is truly missing.”

The master class was rounded off by a Q&A session.