“With If I Were Alive, Novais Oliveira positions himself not only as a voice of the ordinary and unrepresented, but as a filmmaker willing to take formal risks and upend cinematic conventions.”

Part of this year’s Berlinale Panorama section is the latest film from Brazilian director André Novais Oliveira, If I Were Alive. Over the past decade he has become one of those undiscovered, essential filmmakers who populate major festivals without ever fully breaking through to wider international recognition. Films like She Comes Back on Thursday, Long Way Home, and The Day I Met You have played the circuit, earning admiration from those who seek them out, yet he remains oddly under-discussed in broader critical spaces. Each of those films is impressive in its own right. They are grounded in everyday Brazilian life and Afro-Brazilian culture and are shaped with formal care and emotional intelligence. With If I Were Alive it feels possible that Novais Oliveira may finally find a larger audience. He doesn’t abandon the strengths of his earlier work, but expands his scope, adding a fantastical dimension while continuing to push at the boundaries of cinema.

The film opens in 1970s Contagem with a group of teenagers playing together in a makeshift garage band. The scene is loose and playful, the kind of small, lived-in moment Novais Oliveira has always excelled at capturing. At the center of the group is Gilberto (Jean Paulo Campos), whose parents ground him, preventing him from going to a local dance. Despite this, he sneaks out his bedroom window and brings his friends to the home of his crush, Jacira (Tainá Evaristo). The boys gather beneath her window like modern-day minstrels, playing their instruments as Gilberto serenades her in the middle of the night. Neighbors yell at them to shut up. The entire sequence carries a gentle absurdity as Gilberto acts like a romantic fool, staging a performance for an audience of one. There’s something almost Don Quixote-like about him here, as he’s earnest, slightly ridiculous, and driven by an idealized vision of love.

The scene transitions to the dance itself, a burst of 1970s disco and period music. Jacira wears a bright orange outfit with bell bottoms, and the two move together with a mixture of joy and happiness. Novais Oliveira films the dance with the same deftness that defines his entire body of work. In The Day I Met You, long walks through the city become a kind of choreography; here, actual dance becomes an extension of his sensibility. His camera moves with a specific rhythm that is the same in each of his films. Even the dialogue feels lyrical, as each word is placed with care and each pause part of the film’s greater composition. Novais Oliveira has always had an instinct for finding this lyricism in ordinary gestures, and in this sequence, that instinct becomes overtly kinetic, pushing his filmmaking to the next level.

After the dance, Gilberto and Jacira walk home together. Jacira admits she had a good time, but tells him that doesn’t mean she forgives him. We’re never told what he’s done to upset her, and the film doesn’t explain it. Moments later, Gilberto notices a man watching them from the bushes. Acting on impulse, he runs after the figure, demanding to know why they’re being watched. Fireflies flicker in the dark as their glowing intensifies and then a blinding white flash appears in the bushes and the scene ends.

The film jumps to its title card seventeen minutes in, as a deliberate rupture of the prior rhythm. When the image returns, five decades have passed. Gilberto (now played by Norberto Novais Oliveira) and Jacira (now played by Conceição Evaristo) have been married for fifty years. Age has shaped them both. Jacira takes multiple medications and struggles with severe blood pressure issues; she collapses in public and is taken to the hospital. Gilberto, while somewhat stronger physically, lives with high cholesterol and shows signs of encroaching dementia. Their love remains evident and as strong as ever, but it exists now within fragility, routine, and age.

From here, Novais Oliveira allows the film to unfold in unpredictable ways. For the next hour, the narrative resists settling into any single mode. Time and space begin to feel elastic. The film shifts tones and registers, at moments grounded and observational, at others strange and exciting. Novais Oliveira has always resisted rigid narrative structures, but here that resistance becomes more pronounced. Few filmmakers are able to dismantle form without losing emotional coherence, yet he manages to keep the film rooted in feeling even as he destabilizes its shape. The effect is disorienting in a gentle way, as the film sheds normal dramatic tropes and upends cinematic conventions while becoming sensational and invigorating.

Despite this, Novais Oliveira never loses sight of the social realities that have long defined his cinema. If I Were Alive remains deeply concerned with aging, poverty, and the status of the aging. The elderly in the film are not romanticized. They are isolated, medically vulnerable, and largely abandoned by those meant to support them. Their friends have died and their children are distant. The director continues to ask the question: when your body begins to fail, and the world has already moved on from you, is there anyone out there to care for you?

This question gives the film its emotional weight and connects its surprises to the thematic heft. These moments of formal daring only deepen that weight rather than distract from it. Novais Oliveira is not only interested in the ways he surprises the viewers by creating a narrative spectacle, but he’s also interested in how cinema can stretch to hold the experiences of time, loss, and endurance that conventional narrative forms often flatten.

It would be a disservice to reveal too much about the film’s later turns, as its power lies partly in the way they are unexpected. What can be said is that If I Were Alive feels like a genuine step forward for Novais Oliveira, though not a departure from his earlier work, but an expansion of it. The film suggests a director who is no longer content merely to observe and critique everyday Brazilian life and society with lyrical intimacy, but who wants to actively reshape the language through which that life is shown.

This is still very much Novais Oliveira’s cinema, as it is modest in scale and focused on the Afro-Brazilian working-class experience. Yet there is also a new ambition here, a willingness to experiment and create new forms of cinema. With If I Were Alive, Novais Oliveira positions himself not only as a voice of the ordinary and unrepresented, but as a filmmaker willing to take formal risks and upend cinematic conventions. It is the work of a director moving toward something larger, and perhaps, very soon toward a truly masterful film.

(c) Image copyright – Jeanine Moraes