Conecta Fiction & Entertainment, taking place in Cuenca, Spain, this week, may be mostly a TV industry gathering, but Brazil’s Oscar-winning movie I’m Still Here, directed by Walter Salles and starring Fernanda Torres, got a big shout-out at the event on Wednesday.
Alex Medeiros, head of drama, documentaries & film at Brazilian media and entertainment giant Grupo Globo‘s streaming service Globoplay, appeared at Conecta in a session entitled “American Commissioners Uncovered,” and he touted the movie’s success. Highlighting that the story of a family broken apart by dictatorship was the first movie from the company after it merged its two film brands under the Globo Filmes banner, he said: “We’re extremely happy and proud that we won Brazil’s first-ever Oscar for best international feature.”
The executive then quipped: “Well, it’s only downhill from there, but this is really a great moment for us, and we hope to keep investing in the theatrical experience.”
Globo brings films to cinemas first and then to its streaming platform, and there is a good reason for that. “We still think that the better they do theatrically, the better they will do on the platform, and so far, that has been the case,” Medeiros explained.
Next up for Globo is School Without Walls, a film about a public school in one of Brazil’s biggest favelas directed by Cao Hamburger, that is a co-production of Brazil’s Gullane, Portugal’s Ukbar Filmes and France’s Playtime Group that is also backed by Telecine. Julio Andrade stars as an inspirational headteacher in the movie.
“We are shooting in two weeks,” Medeiros shared at Conecta. “We have high hopes for this movie. It’s a beautiful, true story about a guy who implements a very revolutionary methodology in a school in a very difficult area of Sao Paulo.”
On Tuesday at Conecta, executives from the likes of Gaumont Television and Warner Bros. Discovery had discussed their original programming plans and the state of the TV industry.
