PR in the Philippines

(SeaPRwire) –   No one wants to ride the Wrinkle Wagon. This is the vehicle that transports elderly people out of town when they are forced into exile in the realistic dystopia of The Blue Trail.

In Brazilian writer-director Gabriel Mascaro’s latest film, the authoritarian government has resolved to boost productivity by removing older adults from daily life—so younger individuals no longer have to care for them. “It’s not a movie about a gadget or technology that disrupts the present,” Mascaro tells Inverse. “It’s about a cultural change that normalizes elderly people being arrested and taken to a senior colony.”

77-year-old Tereza (Denise Weinberg), who works at an alligator meat processing plant, believes she still has three years left before being affected—only those 80 and older are taken. But when the age limit is lowered to 75, her days of freedom are numbered. Now under the custody of her adult daughter, Tereza can’t buy a plane ticket (her lifelong dream is to fly at least once) or even take a long-distance bus without her guardian’s permission.

These restrictions on her independence, in the final days before she’s moved to an elderly colony, push Tereza to defy the authorities. She embarks on an unauthorized journey through the Amazon, initially to fulfill her last wish and eventually to embrace the fact that she’s still alive.

Mascaro was first intrigued by the lack of elderly protagonists in films, especially in genre narratives. When an older character does take the lead, he notes, the conflict often centers on a terminal illness or nostalgia for the past. These characters are rarely portrayed as having a future or a chance to reinvent themselves.

“Genre films are associated with young bodies: coming-of-age stories, dystopias, and road movies,” Mascaro says. “That’s why I deliberately decided to make a movie to play with genre conventions that often don’t allow for an elderly body to be the protagonist. Why can’t elderly people rebel against the system? Why can’t elderly people have a rite of passage that is not death? Why can’t elderly bodies experience something new?”

For Mascaro, The Blue Trail grew from a personal seed—an intimate example of the story’s core theme: A person can continue to grow and reinvent themselves no matter their age. “I was really inspired by how my grandmother started painting when she was 80 years old, just after my grandfather passed away,” he explains. “It was very inspiring to see her discovering new meaning for her life.” Mascaro’s grandmother, now 95, has seen the film.

“There was a big scare about her missing the movie if she died before the release, so I asked her if she wanted to watch the movie on a computer, and she said, ‘No, I want to see it in the cinema,’” he recalls. “She saw it on the big screen when the movie was released in Brazil.”

While Mascaro believes older audiences might find specific moments in the film humorous or harrowing, he hopes young viewers will reconsider how they see the elderly. “To see someone in her 70s experiencing the blue slime snail [whose brightly colored secretion has psychotropic effects that let the characters see the future when poured over one’s eyes] or having her first massage session or having this amazing encounter with a new friend dancing and pulsating can be powerful,” he adds.

In The Blue Trail, the insidiousness of the government’s policies manifests not through overt violence but in how those in power have persuaded citizens to police one another under the guise that the rules benefit everyone. Wherever Tereza goes, someone asks her for her documents to confirm her age—even when she’s trying to buy food.

“Everyone is surveilling each other, and for me that makes the autocracy feel more powerful than having an official government army with big guns,” Mascaro explains. The situations in the film feel so grounded in reality that some viewers can’t tell they are fictional. “It’s so interesting because people sometimes ask me in different countries, ‘Is this really happening in Brazil?’ And that’s so amazing because the movie has this absurdist, humorous tone. But people still can find in their heart that it really could happen.”

Violence also appears in the state’s literal control over people’s bodies. At one point, Tereza and other elderly individuals about to be shipped to the colony are forced to wear diapers—even if they don’t physically need to. On top of that, a government employee must invasively check that they’ve put it on correctly.

“When I was researching, a lot of elderly people told me, ‘When you start wearing diapers you lose your privacy,’” he recalls, referring to how caretakers ultimately make all the decisions. Elderly people are often denied the right to consent. “It’s such a strong feeling of violation for someone to do this to your body.”

In Mascaro’s previous film Divine Love, a similar bodily boundary is crossed. When a woman enters a building in that futuristic narrative—where evangelical Christianity dominates all aspects of Brazilian life—a high-tech door reveals if she is pregnant and her marital status. In The Blue Trail, evangelical Christianity appears as digital Bibles (depicted as translucent tablets) sold by Roberta (Miriam Socarrás), an elderly woman who doesn’t actually believe in God, as she travels by boat.

“There are a lot of boats in the Amazon region that try to convert Indigenous people to evangelical Christianity,” Mascaro says about the real-life inspiration for this aspect of the film. “These big boats become like floating churches.”

Mascaro focused on an elderly character in The Blue Trail, but the dystopia on screen isn’t far from the many instances of forced displacement around the world “because of wars, poverty, and environmental catastrophes that force immigration,” he says. Since aging is a universal experience, Tereza’s story may make audiences reflect on the millions of people in similar situations for various reasons.

“In this movie I try to generate empathy through the elderly. We are not talking about a Palestinian or a Latin American immigrant in the U.S. We’re talking about elderly people. Being old is a huge transgression in this world,” Mascaro said. “Hopefully this example can also bring us back to feel empathy for others who are also being displaced.”

The Blue Trail is currently playing in select theaters.