Director Alan Minas spoke with Four Time Film School Dropout about Luiza’s Desert, discussing the film’s visual language, emotionally layered sound design, its exploration of mental illness and adolescence, and the role of art and silence in shaping Luiza’s journey.
1. The opening immediately establishes a distinct visual style, with the camera moving alongside the characters in a way that creates both intimacy and tension. How did you and your cinematographer develop that approach?
Alan Minas:
In the film, Soraia’s psychotic break shatters the stability of her family, leaving her daughter, Luiza, confused and deeply unsettled. Beginning the film with that episode was our way of allowing the audience to experience emotions similar to those felt by the young protagonist.
Both in Luiza’s life and in the film’s structure, the psychotic episode functions as a disruptive and deeply unsettling force that breaks apart what would otherwise be a predictable and linear reality.
To visually represent that idea, we wanted the opening sequence to feel fragmented. We incorporated different textures and layers of visual noise that could somehow mirror the mental confusion Soraia experiences during her psychotic break. That imbalance extends beyond her and profoundly affects Luiza, whose own life is shaken by the experience.
To reinforce that concept, we used a handheld camera that relentlessly follows both characters at a frantic pace, emphasizing that they share the same overwhelming emotional tension. We also knew this concept would ultimately find its fullest expression through dynamic editing and the film’s color grading, completing the chaotic atmosphere we wanted to create.
2. The score often takes unexpected directions, sometimes feeling unconventional or even unsettling. What conversations shaped the film’s musical identity?
Alan Minas:
Our initial approach to the film’s sound design was to create an emotional soundscape that could sometimes feel gentle and comforting, while at other times becoming deeply disturbing. This constant fluctuation reflects Luiza’s own emotional instability.
For Soraia’s scenes, we created dense layers of sound intended to suggest the disorder she experiences internally, filled with noises and voices that exist only in her mind.
Other techniques helped reinforce this sense of disorder throughout the film, including overlapping dialogue—which reflects the lack of communication between family members—and the use of off-screen sound to create tension within the image itself.
Music also plays an essential role in the film. Although we deliberately avoided a predictable or cliché score, we incorporated traditional Brazilian instruments such as the cuíca and the berimbau to preserve the story’s cultural identity.
From the earliest draft of the screenplay, Ravel’s Boléro was conceived as one of the film’s central characters. Used as a leitmotif, it accompanies Soraia’s dreamlike inner world. It first appears as subtle musical phrases in the opening scene before gradually becoming increasingly dramatic.
During its climax, the music’s repetitive rhythmic progression takes on an almost ritualistic quality. Like a trance, it reaches Luiza during her own cathartic moment, when she paints her body and drinks the pink paint.
We also chose “Desculpe Babe” by Os Mutantes to close the film because of its emotional resonance. Its triumphant atmosphere accompanies lyrics that speak directly to Luiza’s liberation, while its melody balances exhilaration and melancholy, reinforcing the feeling of one final emotional catharsis.
3. The film explores adolescence alongside a parent’s declining mental health. What interested you in telling those two emotional journeys in parallel?
Alan Minas:
Stories about adolescence have always fascinated me because that stage of life is filled with challenges and emotional dilemmas.
It’s the period when people leave the safety of home and begin experiencing the world. They often fall in love for the first time, begin exploring their sexuality, choose a career, search for belonging, and face countless other life-defining moments—all while undergoing enormous physical and emotional changes.
Placing a teenager in the middle of a crisis, as Luiza is through her mother’s psychotic break, throws her into a whirlwind of emotions that could either destroy her or force her to grow stronger.
The film chooses the second path. Despite every obstacle and every painful decision, Luiza ultimately finds a way forward, emerging more mature, stronger, and ready to continue her own journey.
4. Art and creativity appear throughout the film, particularly in Luiza’s drawings and the encouragement she receives from her friend. What role does art play in her emotional development?
Alan Minas:
Luiza is shy, and art is the only way she truly allows herself to be seen.
The same talent that earns her recognition—and even captures the attention of the most popular boy at school—also becomes a source of fear.
Her anxiety about the world losing its color, along with the blurred line between fantasy and madness, serves as a metaphor for her uncertainty about sanity itself.
She associates her love of drawing with her mother’s psychotic episode, believing that art may be a gateway to madness. In this way, art becomes both a symptom of illness and the very thing capable of healing her.
Only through her journey does Luiza come to understand that opposing emotions and contradictory truths can coexist within the same person, just as light and shadow can exist within the same drawing.
By the end of the film, she fully embraces art as part of who she is. That acceptance becomes evident in the final scene: the birds that escaped from the wall return, restoring her confidence and hope; her colorful graffiti spreads across the sidewalk; and finally, with quiet confidence and maturity, she finishes her own story by painting the canvas black.
5. Several scenes rely on visual storytelling rather than dialogue, particularly moments involving Luiza’s first kiss and her relationship with her family. How did you decide when silence could communicate more than words?
Alan Minas:
I’m extremely careful with words—their rhythm, their natural delivery, and the many meanings they can carry.
But I’m equally aware of how many meanings silence itself can contain.
The silences throughout the film shape the characters and the spaces around them. They give meaning to time as it stretches, fragments, and occasionally seems to stop altogether.
Silence becomes a form of dramatic power. It invites the audience to actively participate in the story by giving meaning to what isn’t spoken—to what is merely suggested.
In that sense, silence, like pauses, gives viewers the freedom to form their own interpretations.
Within silence, entirely different films can exist.
6. The mother’s struggles are portrayed through a series of increasingly intense moments rather than lengthy explanations. How did you approach depicting her mental illness in a way that felt honest and respectful?
Alan Minas:
In 2021, while researching the screenplay for Luiza’s Desert, I spent eleven months visiting an institution that supports people living with various mental illnesses.
That experience eventually led me to make the documentary You Didn’t Know Me, in which several of those individuals created their own short films.
That documentary became one of the foundations for building Soraia’s character, both for me and for the actress portraying her, alongside many conversations and practical rehearsals.
From the very first draft of the screenplay, I made the deliberate decision never to reveal Soraia’s diagnosis.
Inspired by my own experiences, I believe that technical knowledge is less important than empathy. Regardless of medical terminology, we can care for people facing these conditions simply through affection and respect for their limitations—as we all have our own limitations.
For Luiza’s Desert, it was enough to show how Soraia’s behavior and her disconnection from reality affected Luiza and devastated the family.
I wanted to create dramatic situations that would leave Luiza emotionally overwhelmed and unsure how to respond.
My hope was that, by identifying with Luiza, audiences would experience similar emotions themselves—from bewilderment to compassion.
7. The father is placed in an impossible position, balancing his own future with caring for his family. What conversations did you have about developing his emotional arc?
Alan Minas:
The most important aspect of creating the father was encouraging audiences to have conflicting feelings about him.
How can we condemn a man who had already decided to leave his marriage before his wife’s psychotic break and had likely already become emotionally involved with someone else?
That moral ambiguity makes him human and far more compelling.
The same contradiction extends to his role as a father. He’s both brave and cowardly, present and absent.
I find it much more interesting when characters escape simple notions of good and evil and instead exist within uncertainty.
8. I came away feeling that the film explores how one person’s illness can affect an entire family. Was that something you set out to explore from the beginning, or did it become more prominent as the story developed?
Alan Minas:
The central conflict revolves around Soraia’s psychotic break.
However, it was always our intention not to reveal her diagnosis or attempt to explain its causes or treatments.
The story has always belonged to Luiza.
Our goal was to show how mental illness transforms not only the person experiencing it, but everyone around them.
Luiza becomes a mother to her own mother. Her youth is redirected onto an entirely different path.
She must learn to accept Soraia’s new limitations, find new ways of relating to her, and, above all, reinvent herself despite everything.
9. Is there anything you discovered about the story or the characters during production that wasn’t on the page when you first began making the film?
Alan Minas:
I don’t remember any major discoveries.
The production itself was remarkably smooth, thanks to a team that was deeply committed to making the film.
Perhaps the greatest surprise was the profound bond that developed among all of us.
Even today, it’s remarkable how close and harmonious everyone who worked on the film has remained.