Kleber Mendonça Filho

Member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) since 2017.

[press conference for Aquarius (2016) at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival] It's a film about resistance, a little bit about survival, and maybe above all it's about the energy that you get from trying to survive. Technically speaking, you're spending energy and getting exhausted trying to survive but I actually believe it gives you more energy to go on and fight and defend yourself and, in my mind, that's what's in the script and something that Sônia [Sonia Braga] responded to extremely well. She understood it right away. She actually finds it interesting, the whole situation, because she gets a kind of adrenaline or a kind of a tension that makes her tick, and I think she got that very well and she did it very well in terms of trying to defend herself and at the same time reacting.