Daily Inspiration Quote by Walter Salles

There’s a quiet humility in Salles’s phrasing, but also a strategic claim to lineage. By invoking Cinema Novo, he’s not name-dropping a film movement so much as locating his own work inside a national tradition that treated cinema as an argument with reality. Cinema Novo in the 1960s and 70s was built on scarcity and urgency: handheld grit, political heat, and the idea that Brazilian screens should stop imitating imported fantasies and start confronting hunger, class, dictatorship, and regional inequality. To say his generation was “influenced” is to admit that aesthetic choices are never just style; they are inheritances.

The second sentence is the tell: “we’re echoing what’s been done way in the past.” Echoing can sound passive, but here it reads like self-defense against the expectation of constant novelty. Salles suggests that Brazilian filmmakers are often forced into a double bind: be “original” in a way that pleases global festivals, while also “authentic” in a way that satisfies a market’s appetite for national flavor. The echo becomes a refusal of that trap. He’s arguing that the past isn’t a museum; it’s a toolbox.

Context matters: Salles emerges after dictatorship, during redemocratization and the uneven revival of Brazilian cinema in the 1990s. His films carry Cinema Novo’s social conscience but often translate it into more intimate narratives and polished craft. The subtext is continuity without imitation: honoring a radical grammar while adapting it to a new Brazil, and to a world watching.