The boys’ relationship springs from their friendship. In the feature, there’s not sex, but sexuality is much more present.” “Because they grew up a little bit, I adapted the story to a more sexualized context,” Ribeiro say. The actors were also three years older, and even though they were still playing young adolescents, that changed the dynamic. “We wanted to do the short to prove we could do it and to show my vision of the film, especially because the first time I presented the story, 'It's the story of a blind teenager finding out he’s gay,’” he says.īut making the short also changed the feature, for myriad reasons, including feedback he received from festival audiences and the more than 3 million people who have watched it on YouTube. He also wanted to make the film through his own production company, which meant raising a million dollars for a feature debut. He wanted to explore directing a blind character before jumping into the feature. Ribeiro knows he’s lucky that they could all still pass for young teens.īut the short was important. He turned 18 on the first day of the “The Way He Looks” shoot. His 15th birthday was the last day of the shoot. Ribeiro first introduced these characters in his 2010 award-winning short “I Don’t Want to Go Back Alone.” Audi was 21 then and Amorim 17. Our vision, our sight is what the problem is sometimes.” So it’s an interesting thing to have this blind character. “It’s also attached to the visual thing, the prejudice and homophobia, because I think nowadays people don’t mind knowing there are gay people around, they just don’t want to see. It’s not about sex, because people are afraid of sex, I think. And when it’s innocent, people see it from another perspective. When I first began, I didn’t know if it was going to work. I thought using that character, the blind character, would makes people think about it. Sexuality is such a big discussion, like where does it come from? It's very hard, this discussion. “The blind character was a good way of talking about homosexuality. Ribeiro simply wanted to write a movie that talked about gay themes, and he wanted to write one in which the feelings were so universal that it might even make the homophobic reassess their prejudice. “The Way He Looks” didn’t start with a blind character. She was like, 'Why is he taking all this time from me?’ But we were developing a relationship that we couldn’t tell anybody about.” “But I wasn’t out to her, so to her, we were best friends and he was stealing a part of our friendship. “That story, it’s not the way it happened, but it’s similar, too, because I was friends with this girl for a long time, and then when my boyfriend came along, our friendship changed, because he was in my life. “I had a boyfriend when I was 16, and I had a best friend,” says Sao Paulo native Ribeiro, 32. But the boys’ unspoken crush on one another changes things. Now Gabriel does, too, and at first, they are a happy threesome. She gets him and his need for independence. Giovana has been the only one not to define him by his disability. The other kids bully Leo, and his overprotective mother smothers him. Before new kid Gabriel (Fabio Audi) comes to town, lifelong friends Leo (Ghilherme Lobo) and Giovana ( Tess Amorim) are a closed circuit. What moviegoers have embraced is an irresistible evocation of puppy love as well as a portrait of the way new relationships can alter friendships. The romantic comedy-drama has been embraced on the festival circuit, where in addition to winning two prizes at the Berlin International Film Festival when it made its world premiere, it has captured audience awards at Frameline, Athens International Film Festival, Guadalajara Mexican Film Festival, LA Outfest, New York Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, and Torino International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. He has these challenges, and that’s what’s going to make it interesting.’” “It’s about the universal theme of falling in love for the first time. He has these challenges he has to go through, but the film’s not about that.’ “And I thought, 'No, I want to do a sweet thing.
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