INTERVIEW: São Paulo-set ‘Shine Your Eyes’ arrives on Netflix
Photo: Shine Your Eyes stars OC Ukeje as Amadi and Ike Barry as Ogboh. Photo courtesy of Netflix / Provided by Susan Norget Film Promotion with permission.
Filmmaker Matias Mariani’s new movie, Shine Your Eyes, tells the story of Amadi (OC Ukeje) and Ikenna (Chukwudi Iwuji), two Nigerian brothers who have been living apart for quite some time. Ikenna has been living in São Paulo, and Amadi, a musician, wants to find him and bring him home to Lagos, Nigeria. The brotherly journey that they embark on is set against the backdrop of this vibrant Brazilian city.
“I think the initial inspiration I could trace it back quite a while ago when I went to school at NYU, the university there, and I was coming from Brazil,” Mariani said in a recent phone interview. “I had never lived abroad before, and it was a very unsettling experience. I didn’t know of anyone in New York, so the idea to do something about the feeling of being a foreigner, the idea that you are lost in a city you don’t really understand, that you don’t control the language and signs and stuff like that, I think I can trace it all the way back there.”
Another idea that inspired Mariani to make Shine Your Eyes, which is now available on Netflix, is that he missed his native city of São Paulo. He brought these two interests together: this idea of being a foreigner and the love for his hometown.
“From that time, where I had this very generic idea, what we did is me and my then co-writer, Maíra Bühler, we decided to research what kind of new people were coming to São Paulo, new social groups and stuff like that,” he said.
They began to learn about the community of African immigrants in the city, and they set out to make authentic connections in the neighborhood. They did this by offering free Portuguese language classes at a local cultural center.
“We got a lot of different people who just showed up for the two hours per week to learn Portuguese with us,” he said. “And we traveled to Nigeria to do interviews there, and I think that’s where the characters started to take shape. I remember the first glimpse of Ikenna was doing an interview in Nigeria and someone telling me that when they lived in London there was this guy who was walking around with a notebook and saying he had cracked the code of horse racing, so I was like that’s an interesting idea. I think from there it developed into a fully realized character and all of that. I think the actors really helped in developing it. I remember the first conversation I had with OC Ukeje who plays Amadi. He was very interested in the role and everything, but he was very straightforward and said, ‘I need to work with you a little bit because I think you not being an Igbo I think there are some characteristics of the character we should change, and that he should be more like this, more like that.’ And I was really open to it, and I think it was great to have his contribution on it. At the same time, we had also an Igbo writer called Chika Anadu, who did the last treatment and also helped us a lot with the cultural environment to set it the way that we should.”
This interdependent spirit is not new to Mariani, who comes from a production background. He admitted to having a very collaborative understanding of filmmaking, and he thought that this story needed the input of many people.
“I understood that this story in particular was about people who had a very different life experience than mine, so I felt like I should really add diversity to the writing team,” Mariani said. “We worked with Igbo writers, African-Brazilian writers. It became almost a writing room situation where a lot of different people would give input.”
Mariani said that he has been influenced by African cinema and especially movies from Nigeria, and this cinematic fascination helped with Shine Your Eyes. Because many of these influences depicted people and situations very different from his own upbringing in Brazil, he felt it his duty to build relatability and universality into the movie.
“Personally I am an older brother, and I come from a very demanding family myself,” he said. “I always had a deep envy of [my brother], and that really colored our relationship until we were older and we were able to get over it. But in a way I empathize a lot with the feeling that Ikenna has over Amadi. I always say that when I watch the film now — I’ve watched it in Berlin when it came out for the first time with an audience — I feel like I’m with Ikenna the whole film up until the moment where Amadi bangs the guitar down. And that’s when I’m with him [Amadi], but I really empathize with Ikenna’s point of view throughout the film.”
Lensing in São Paulo was a special experience for Mariani. He believes the city has been seriously under-represented in terms of cinematography. Whenever he sees Brazil depicted on film, the scenes are usually of Rio de Janeiro, or São Paulo is seen as ugly and rough around the edges.
“You need to see it from an angle,” Mariani said of São Paulo. “In a lot of ways, what I tried to do in the film was to show that we are still a melting pot. We are still something that is boiling right now.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Shine Your Eyes, directed by Matias Mariani, is now available to stream on Netflix. Click here for more information.
