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Renowned Brazilian actor-director Lázaro Ramos, who is at the Berlin Film Festival with Allan Deberton’s poignant queer youth drama “Gugu’s World,” has lined up his next directorial project. The road movie “Mais Que Amigos” (“More Than Friends,” in literal translation) will reunite Ramos with his famed “Madame Satã” and “Lower City” collaborator Sérgio Machado to portray the friendship between a singer and a poet.
The road movie comes five years after Ramos’s highly successful “Executive Order,” a dystopian film starring “Harry Potter” breakout Alfie Enoch and Brazilian superstar Taís Araújo that was the most-viewed Brazilian film in its home country in its year of release. In the years in between, the actor also directed “Um Ano Inesquecível – Outono” and the documentary “Bando, A Movie Of.” Brazilian banner ELO Studios, which distributed “Executive Order,” has boarded the project.
Emmy-nominated Ramos is one of Brazil’s leading creative voices, with a decades-long illustrious career in film, television and theater. The actor starred in seminal Brazilian films of the early 2000s, most notably Karim Aïnouz’s “Madame Satã” and Héctor Babenco’s “Carandiru.” Ramos broke out into the scene in Salvador alongside best friend and frequent collaborator Wagner Moura, who recently became Brazil’s first-ever best actor Oscar nominee for his performance in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent.”
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Ramos will also star in “Mais Que Amigos,” which finds the still undescribed pair of friends in a decisive moment of their lives and careers. The trip they decide to embark on becomes a journey of political, musical and existential reflection. Ramos and Machado aim to “transcend the biographical to craft a sensitive manifesto about a profound Brazil where popular culture and poetry coexist as means of resistance and beauty.”
“I am very happy to direct my fourth film and reaffirm my partnership with ELO,” said Ramos. “Especially because my film will be in direct dialogue with this moment where Brazilian cinema is celebrating its identity and language by telling a story that takes place in our country.”
Briefly speaking with Variety from a very busy Berlin, Ramos added that he yearns to “make a film about strong, extreme emotions.” By extreme, the director means not only in terms of the deep investigations surrounding his two characters but also in how the film portrays “the unlikely friendship between two very different people, during a historical period when a specific type of Brazil was being born.”
“This trip across the Northeast of that time will uncover foundational elements of our country of today, also allowing me to talk about how art moves our lives, whether we work with or not,” he added.
ELO Studios CEO Sabrina Nudeliman Wagon believes “Mais Que Amigos” reinforces the studio’s commitment to “powerful and sensitive” narratives. “We worked with Lázaro in 2022 and are very happy to produce such a special project. Lázaro brings an irrefutable truth in his work and being able to follow the development process so closely has been an honor. ‘Mais Que Amigos’ will portray a Brazil that many are not aware of, but that is the cultural foundation of our country.”
