ABOUT

Helen is a nine-year-old girl living with her grandmother, Dona Graça, in a cortiço (tenement) in the Bixiga district of São Paulo. Dona Graça cleans houses and sells espetinhos at night to get by. The film follows their daily rhythm — and a small, tender quest, Helen’s search for a makeup case as a birthday gift for her grandmother — to open onto much larger questions: social exclusion, political neglect, and the absence of basic rights for people living on the city’s margins.

Built on a strong current of realism, the film screened at international festivals including Cinéma en Construction at the Cinélatino festival in Toulouse, France, and was praised for bringing a breath of hope and sensitivity into a hard social reality.

My role: Original score
Tools: Cubase / Pro Tools
Notable: International festival selection (Cinélatino — Cinéma en Construction, Toulouse, 2020); ensemble cast led by Marcélia Cartaxo and Tony Tornado

Helen link on IMDB : 8.2

Case study
Brief: The director’s direction was clear, with a strong focus on realism and social dynamics. The score had to underline interior emotional shifts without scoring the surface of scenes: honoring the tenderness between a child and her grandmother without sentimentalizing their hardship, and never editorializing over the film’s social truth.

Approach: I kept the score deliberately restrained and naturalistic, used sparingly, leaving generous space for dialogue and the ambient life of the cortiço. Rather than heightening the film’s hardest moments, the music stays underneath them, present mainly to underline Helen’s inner world and the bond at the film’s center. It opens up only where the story genuinely earns a note of hope, so the score supports the realism instead of imposing emotion on it.

Result: Selected for Cinéma en Construction at Cinélatino (Toulouse, 2020), and recognized in reception for bringing hope and sensitivity to a hard social reality, the emotional register the score was written to hold.