Bárbara Colen first burst onto the international film scene in 2016, thanks to her mesmerizing performance as the young Sonia Braga (playing Clara) in Aquarius. Born on February 17th 1986, Kleber Mendonça Filho, the director immediately realized that this Aquarian was the right choice for his film of almost the same name.  Her magnetism matched her famous co-star Sonia Braga with panache and intelligence.  To launch a film career at 30 is unusual, but Bárbara Colen fits that bill.  Born in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, she worked as a lawyer for many years, until she finally decided to try acting and getting involved with theatre. She explains: -

“It took me a long time to decide to assume acting as a profession. I was a civil servant working as a lawyer at the ’Ministerio Público’. I worked there for 7 years and then when I was in my 20s, I decided to quit the job. I was fed up! Then I remembered about acting. I had programmed my quitting…  my departure, for the 20th of July. One week before, they called me to do Aquarius! It was a sign from the universe… you know! ‘You have to do this’… you’re in the right groove!”

In effect. Aquarius was her very first experience in film and proved to be very important: -

“It was so fantastic to be able to work with Kleber (Mendonça Filho).  I was so anxious and nervous because I didn’t have any experience.  I had done an acting course in a school but it wasn’t a university, so I had no formal education [in drama] … no certificates.  [In many things] you can get on without one, but in cinema it’s different, the relationship with the camera is quite another thing.” 

Aquarius, released in 2016, won many awards. It carried away the Best Film Awards at the Sydney, Transatlantyk, Cartagena and Jerusalem Film Festivals while Sonia Braga won Best Actor at the Mar del Plata, Havana, San Diego and the Lima International Film Festivals. The film also has a long list of nominations, and generated a great deal of controversy, primarily in Brazil, but also abroad, due to its political tone and sharp criticisms of political and social policies in Brazil. The cast carried protest posters themselves, written in Portuguese and French, at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival decrying what they perceived as a serious lack of democracy in Brazil. Some posters read “Sauvez la démocratie Brésilienne” (Save Brazilian Democracy) and «Dilma, vamos resistir com vocé »  (Dilma, we will resist with you). or simply " Brazil is experiencing a coup d'etat".  This was a strong reaction to the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, the President of Brazil. Right-wing critics and commentators denounced their protest,  printing comments in their reviews: “It is the duty of the people of good will to boycott this film”. This led to the 'Aquarius' production company utilizing this very sentence on their promotional posters.  This was seen as an act of subversion but, as they say, there is no such thing as bad publicity as, in the end, it all serves much the same purpose.  By shining a bright light on the film and its cast, including Bárbara Colen, it brought it and Bárbara, to people’s attention.

Crew and cast of 'Aquarius' protest in Cannes. Bárbara Colen is second from left, The Director Kleber Mendonça Filho is 4th from right.

Rubbing shoulders with political issues remains important to Colen: -

“Politics is such a nightmare because everything is moving so fast.  We used to believe that our democracy was stronger than it is and now everything is being destroyed. It’s ghastly!  What was the trigger?  The element that changed everything? In Brazil, we have had a lot of promises: racial issues and women’s rights being discussed, but not dealt with! They’re trying to destroy everything that we have achieved all these years. The government are really frightened by what we have all achieved. Black people are now in the universities in Brazil and they are [finally] being able to write their own stories and make their own films, putting their narratives into the public domain… It’s happening all over the world!”

You can see why Colen was happy to play Rose in the 2019, ‘No Coração do Mundo’ 2019 (In the Heart of the World), written and directed by Maurílio Martins and Gabriel Martins (no kinship).  The film focuses on a group of the lesser-privileged inhabitants of the Brazilian city of Contagem. This town is associated with heavy industry as well as mineral and chemical processes. It may be responsible for nearly 6% of the states GDP (behind Belo Horizonte and Betim) but, as a result, it has serious air and water pollution issues and the Pampulha Lake is contaminated with heavy metals  The film follows the lives 6 or 7 inhabitants who yearn for better times, for paradise, in short, for a place ‘In the Heart of the world.” Many take dubious routes in their efforts to find it, inevitably pulling each other deeper into crime.

Bárbara Colen and Grace Passô : 'In the Heart of the World'             

Colen: -

“Contagem has really poor neighbourhoods and yet, some are able to go to university and now they are making their own films! I [am happy that] I have also been a part of ‘No Coração do Mundo’, which had its première in the Rotterdam Film Festival. It’s the story about [marginalized] characters of the peripheric zone … with a lot of black characters...”

Since she emerged in 2016, Colen has hardly stopped working. She has been involved in many TV productions and is gradually moving more and more into feature films. In 2019, not only was she in ‘In the Heart of the World’ but also the protagonist in two other productions that were both screened at the 2019, BFI London Film Festival.

One of these is Eryk Rocha’s ‘Burning Night’ (2019) (Breve Miragem de Sol). Set in Rio de Janeiro, it is a moving tale of loneliness in the fight for survival, while immersed in the rapidly-changing and often violent world of Rio de Janeiro’s night life.   A taxi driver (Fabrício Boliveira) struggles to pay for the maintenance of his ten-year old son after his recent divorce.  The lives and stories of his work colleagues and passengers inevitably impact on him as he tries to make it through the violence and frenzy of Rio’s night life.  Colen’s performance as the taxi driver’s passenger and subsequent lover, is very moving as the two find solace in each other in the maze of Rio’s city life.  Colen’s expressivity, as much as Boliveira’s understated performance, fill the long silences with no dialogue yet speaking volumes of their lives and of the city itself.

 Burning Night

Colen: -

“Burning Night was another really beautiful experience because Eryk (Rocha) is a director that likes to put you into the real moment. So, there we were, in the streets of Rio de Janeiro inside that car… and we did a lot of improvisations … it was very intense and we used a lot of things that were personal to us, personal stories that really were our stories.  The thing about ‘Burning Night’ was the fact that we had time … sometimes we had a whole night to shoot one scene, you know… one single scene… so it was amazing. Those are the perfect conditions to act for me, because we would get into the car, start to improvise and then when we found something that was concrete, we would work on it and then shoot it.  It was very difficult [for me] to film in the streets of Rio because I‘m not from there. It was the first time I was living there. Before we shot the film, I went to Rio and stayed there for a whole month, living in the northern part of the city which is the most violent and going to the clinic where the character worked and I remember feeling: ‘Everything is here … I don’t have to pretend anything! It was really strong, I remember that clinic, you know, and the police cars that entered with the people who had been shot and all that stuff, and we were really there. I was there! I remember waiting in Fabrício’s car and he was coming and [while] I was just waiting, I watched all the real stuff coming in…Fact and fiction were mixed, all the time.”

Immersive and strong material appeals to Colen, so despite the difficulties, she accepted the role of Teresa in 2019 Cannes Jury Prize Winner, ‘Bacurau’, the weird and wonderful surrealistic ‘western’ written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles. Once again working with Sonia Braga and Mendonça Filho, Colen plays a young woman who travels home for the funeral of her 97-year old grandmother, Carmelita. Almost a mythical figure in her community, Carmelita was the matriarch of Bacurau, a village so far into the ‘back country’ that it does not even feature on the map.   The film has great depth with many layers upon layers that lead into dark places:-

“In the beginning you think it is a typical Brazilian story with the girl returning and then it develops into something else.”

Bárbara Colen in 'Bacurau'

Unexpected arrivals trigger a bloody siege. Suffering from a lack of water due to the corrupt local mayor, the people survive by their wits and their inventiveness, despite the violence inflicted upon them.  The crew and cast remained for three months isolated, in the small town of Barra, in the municipality of Parelhas (Rio Grande do Norte) where, as in the movie itself, basic amenities were in short supply.  But it was a moving experience for Colen in many ways: -

“For me it was a life changing moment, because, as a woman in my personal life, I felt that it was a moment when I really connected with my personal inner power in the world.  I was there, facing a lot of difficulties in the shooting because we were there and we didn’t have much money to do that film, so it was very difficult, especially because of the subject [matter]that we portrayed. Yet, at the same time, it was so empowering for me as a human being to be able to be there with those people because they have a sense of resistance and love and they were so generous! It really touched me in a deep, deep way… and also for the character of Teresa, who is a great character.

We were immersed there in the ‘sertão‘ (wilderness) for 2 [or 3) months, so you start to get to know people and you live as they live. You get to know the whole atmosphere, the environment and the landscape. Everything is so ‘strong’ when you are acting … because in ‘Bacurau’, it felt as if it wasn’t ‘acting’ in a sense, to represent something. It was [more] like we were actually ‘living’ the things there… with the actors and the local people [who participated and were extras and actors in the production]. It was amazing because they were just like professionals. I used to see them in the scenes and it was an: “Oh my God, look at what they’re doing right now!” Because Kleber and Juliano used to explain to them what they had to do, and the ‘villagers’ had such a [vivid] power of imagination that they could live their situations…”  

 Bacurau

The area where the film was shot is normally semi- arid and very dry. But, in keeping with the weird goings on in the movie, conditions were not normal in real life either, as Colen explains: -

“[In the movie] they were talking about [the lack of] water [due to a dam] but we got to the point where it didn’t stop raining! We were thinking: ‘Oh My God what’s happening, it’s supposed to be a desert!’ It was raining and raining and everything was green!”

Bárbara Colen will now be appearing in TV series and will be shooting a new mini-series now in 2020 in Goias Velho.  As they say: “We ain’t seen nothing yet” from this versatile actress.

‘BACURAU’ will be released in the UK from March 13th 2020, and will be available on MUBI from  March 27th 2020. The film will also be screened at a preview at the BFI Southbank on March 6th with a Q&A with the director Kleber Mendonça Filho.