The Blue Trail

Gabriel Mascaro's fourth feature took the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale in 2025, runner-up to Dag Johan Haugerud's Dreams. It is a Brazilian-Dutch-Mexican-Chilean production, and the Dutch involvement is what brings it inside this catalogue — the film itself is entirely Amazonian.

Denise Weinberg plays Tereza, seventy-seven, in a Brazil that has responded to an ageing population by moving everyone past a certain birthday into a housing colony where they can be productive at nothing. Before she goes, she wants to do one thing she has never done, and the film becomes a river journey: boats, a snail whose mucus induces visions, a pilot played by Rodrigo Santoro, and a bureaucracy following at a polite distance.

Mascaro made Neon Bull and Divine Love, and shares with them a taste for near-future speculation grounded in absolutely concrete places. The film holds 3.72 on Letterboxd from 68,000 ratings — high for a Portuguese-language art film — and works as a road movie before it works as a dystopia, which is why the dystopia lands.