Aging & Wisdom Quote by Walter Salles

To call a whole country and continent "in the making" is both a modesty move and a creative manifesto. Walter Salles, a Brazilian director whose films often orbit travel, displacement, and unfinished selves, frames identity not as a heritage to inherit but as a draft to keep revising. The line carries a filmmaker's instinct: if the culture has not "crystallised", then it remains pliable, open to narration, vulnerable to mythmaking, and hungry for images that can temporarily hold it together.

The subtext is a quiet pushback against the old-world assumption that cultural legitimacy comes from age, canon, and settled hierarchies. Salles isn't begging entry into a European club; he's arguing that "youth" is an aesthetic condition. Young cultures can improvise, hybridize, steal shamelessly, and invent new forms without the burden of reverence. At the same time, "not yet crystallised" hints at unease: fluidity can mean freedom, but it can also mean fragmentation, inequality, and a constant fight over who gets to define the story of "us."

Context matters here. In late 20th- and early 21st-century Brazilian cinema, directors like Salles navigated a country reshaped by dictatorship's aftermath, neoliberal shocks, and aggressive globalization, all while Brazilian art tried to represent a nation too vast and unequal to fit a single narrative. His phrasing turns that mess into method: if identity is still forming, cinema becomes less a mirror than a workshop.