Marcelo Gomes Casts Alfredo Castro in ‘Cape of Pleasures,’ Says ‘I’m Still Here’ Oscar Success Will ‘Open Doors’ for Brazilian Cinema (EXCLUSIVE)

variety.com:

Rafa Sales Ross Guest Contributor Twelve years after co-directing Berlinale entry “The Man of the Crowd,” renowned director Marcelo Gomes (“Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures”) is once again joining forces with filmmaker and visual artist Cao Guimarães (“From the Window of My Room”) for a new film, titled “Cape of Pleasures.” The dystopian thriller is one of the projects selected at this year’s CineMart, the co-production market of the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Speaking exclusively with Variety ahead of the festival, Gomes says the idea for the film came out of reflecting alongside Guimarães on what currently afflicted them. “With ‘The Man of the Crowd,’ we made a film about our affliction about loneliness in big cities. ‘Cape of Pleasures’ came out of our fear of aging in a country with a latent desire for eternal youth.

Being old is almost a crime in Brazil.” “Cape of Pleasures” takes place in a near future in Brazil where a totalitarian regime forces the elderly into residences where they extract memories from their brains to train an AI system.

Horrified by this new reality, a man escapes one of the residences and joins a guerrilla cell led by fellow dissidents over 75. “We are seeing this explosion of far-right groups all over the world, including Brazil, and began wondering how these groups will handle aging because aging is unproductive,” says Gomes. “In ‘Cape of Pleasures,’ the elderly have the rebel spirit while the young are the conservatives who support the oppressive system.