‘The Last Episode’ rescues pop culture from the 1990s in a love letter to the Brazilian outskirts

Erik is 13 years old and has a problem: to impress Sheila, the girl he is in love with, he invented that he has a VHS tape at home with the legendary last episode of Dragon’s Cave – one that was never produced and became one of the great urban legends of Brazilian television. What begins as a white lie turns into a journey of maturity, friendship and discovery in Jardim Laguna, a peripheral neighborhood of Contagem, in 1991. This is the premise of The Last Episodea new feature from Filmes de Plástico that arrived in theaters this Thursday, the 9th, directed by Maurilio Martins.

But it was precisely this isolation that created something special. The neighborhood has always had the state supply center next door. “A lot of people came from abroad, from other places, from Bahia, from the north of Minas, from other states to work here”, recalls the director. “I used to joke that it was a kind of dry port, because there was a passage, a huge flow of people, with amazing stories.” Even without leaving there, Maurilio had contact with the world through these stories.

It was in this context that, at the age of 13, he discovered cinema. “1991, for me, was a year of enchantment, of discovering the world. And it was the year that I decided to make films”, he recalls. The revelation came when watching Flores Islandby Jorge Furtado, at school. “It was the first time I saw a short film. I didn’t know about the existence of a short film until that moment. And, even more so, a short film spoken in Portuguese. So, for me, that was very impactful.”

A neighborhood that no longer exists

Making a period film in the outskirts is a unique challenge. Unlike productions that can rely on preserved historic buildings, Martins had to deal with a common characteristic of these places: constant transformation. On the periphery, people feel happy when they manage to erase the past, because most of the time this past is linked to some type of suffering. Houses are renovated, expanded, rebuilt – a process that can take decades and never really ends.

The houses in Laguna, most of which were self-built and took decades to complete, have been renovated over the years. “From ’91 to 2021, when we film, there are 30 very significant years in this process of change. When you decide to make a period film, you don’t use listed monuments, you don’t use preserved buildings, you don’t use almost anything”, he says.

The solution came from a personal project that Martins had been developing for years: the Peripheral Life Museum. “I cataloged photos, going to neighbors’ houses, asking for these photos, scanning them in high resolution, labeling them and saving them”, he recalls. These images, all taken within a radius of 80 meters from the main character’s house, were fundamental for the reconstruction of the time. “For me it was important that they weren’t random photos, from random neighborhoods.”

Among these photos is one of Maurilio’s own father, Sebastião, who died in 2003. “My father died of a heart attack in 2003. My entire cinematic experience takes place in the absence of my father”, says the director, emotionally. The day he spoke to his father for the last time, they were talking about scripts. “I talked to my father about the script, he asked what it was, what it was for. I went into my room, when I came back my father was dead.” The film thus also becomes a form of dialogue with personal memories and losses. “Going back to 91 and having the courage to put up these photos made me also put up a photo of my father. He appears there with my mother, my family appears there”, he says.

From ‘Incredible Years’ to a Brazilian response

The series Incredible Years was fundamental to Maurilio’s formation. In the early 90s, while still a teenager, he started watching the program on TV Cultura and saw himself reflected in Kevin Arnold and the other characters. The identification was immediate, even with all the distance between the American reality of the 1960s and the Minas Gerais outskirts of the 1990s.

Karate Kid, Jaspion, Dragon’s Cave – all these cultural products shaped generations. The pop culture that formed Brazilians in the 1980s and 1990s was almost entirely foreign, coming from the United States or Japan. And perhaps this influence was even excessive, considering the scarcity of similar Brazilians.

In the film, however, the characters don’t just consume this pop culture – they transform it. “They take it and transform it, because what they do is a radical transformation: they make drawings, dolls. And in the end, not even that is shown, because their local life matters much more, how they relate to each other, how they grow and mature based on our very particular problems”, he says. In an emblematic scene, the boys give up a song by a famous band from the United States to sing Sweet Honeyby Xuxa – a genuinely Brazilian song that is also part of a strong pop culture, but this time ours.

For Matheus, the young actor who plays Erik, the experience of building this character was transformative. “It was an incredible experience, the kind that only art provides,” he says. “Even without having lived at that time, we really felt like we were in that universe. And it was so pleasant and familiar to be there, that we didn’t even want to leave.” Regarding what he hopes the public feels, Matheus is direct: “I hope that everyone looks inside themselves and recognizes their own essence. That we never lose our dreamy side, our creativity.”