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“A Brutal Honesty That Still Feels Poetic”: Walter Thompson-Hernández on His Tribeca World Premiere Kites
Kites In the sprawling favela of Santo Amaro in Rio de Janeiro, Duvo (first-time actor Daniel Fernando do Prado Dorea Lima) currently sits at the top of the pecking order. Under the guise of enriching the community, Duvo and his armed militia regularly engage in illicit activity that, while lucrative, often culminates in death. When it comes to Duvo’s attention that the “help” he’s providing is anything but—in part by a cigarette-smoking guardian angel, whose untimely death was the product of police brutality—he becomes obsessed with a new, much more kid-friendly venture: he decides to finance a kite festival for the children and their families, supplying a plethora of these fine paper creations to be flown over the favela.
Kites, directed by Walter Thompson-Hernández in his feature debut, evokes the surreal visual palette of dreams while being intrinsically rooted in the fabric of this real enclave of Rio. The filmmaker, who appeared on our 25 New Faces of Film list back in 2022, has been hard at work on Kites since 2020, traveling to Brazil to shoot over the course of four years. Utilizing local residents as his principal cast (save for a small role played by City of God’s Alexandre Rodrigues) and largely relying on improvisation, the story itself is indelibly shaped by the community it depicts—encompassing both latent desire and the looming threat of violence, namely by the government’s shadowy surveillance state.
Thompson-Hernández hopped on a Zoom call with me a few days ahead of Kites’ Tribeca world premiere on June 6. Below, find the filmmaker’s insight into the production’s guerrilla sensibility, his background as a New York Times multimedia journalist and the sheer quantity of kites (and sodas) bought during production.
Filmmaker: When we profiled you for the 25 New Faces list back in 2022, you were wrapping up production on this film after two and a half years of filming. Tell me more about the production timeline.
Thompson-Hernández: We actually went back to Brazil three times after that. It took about five years of actual production and filming to make this movie. First of all, I never wrote a script for this movie. The entire movie was improvised. There was a rough outline that I kept on referring to, but that evolved so much. I think what the movie asked us to do was to really trust it, you know? So much of this movie was just real conversations that I was having with my friends, who are all in the movie. I speak fluent Portuguese. I’ve lived there, I’ve worked there and it just felt like the thing to do.
Filmmaker: The film starts by saying that it’s based on a true story, specifically concerning the rash of police violence in Rio. Was there a specific instance that you were looking to narrativize, or did the outline give the performers the liberty to shape it themselves?
Thompson-Hernández: Initially, it was going to be a movie about these young boys, Derek and his brother, and their love for kites. As we started to go back to Rio, these conversations about what it meant to be a Black man or woman, both in the US and in Rio started to happen. This was around the time of George Floyd and conversations about police violence. My friends in Rio were like, “This is happening here, too. And it’s happening at levels that actually might be less reported on, more dangerous.” Everyone had stories about a friend, a brother, a sister, an uncle or aunt who was a victim of police violence. I was like, “Is there a way to make a film about this very innocent and earnest love for kites while also thinking about the effect of police violence on Black people in Rio?”
This idea of Phil [Augusto da Silva Souza] being a guardian angel was based around conversations that a lot of my friends were having: What does protection look like? What does God look like? What does spirituality look like in the realm of kites and community?
Filmmaker: I know that you largely work with first-time actors, who, as you’ve previously described, “essentially play a version of a life they already live in.” How did you settle on the core cast here?
Thompson-Hernández: I used to work for the New York Times for a bunch of years and I started as a multimedia journalist there. I would write, direct, produce and shoot photographs. I kind of did everything. I was in Brazil for a story in Rio and I met this guy named [GioGo] and we became really good friends. I kind of had this idea for a movie, and he was like, “Hey man, I could help find people.” Then another friend, Thiago [Oliveira], Duvo and everybody who was in the movie kind of brought two or three people with them. There was no casting process, there were no audition tapes. It was just like, “Hey, do you have a homie who could maybe play this role?” And they would show up.
In terms of scenes and dialogue, like I said, there was no script. So my question for Duvo or for Larissa [Borges] or for Thiago or for [João Vittor] Pedroza would be “This is what I’m hoping to get out of the scene—how would you say that?” Most of the people in this movie are rappers from Rio. I feel like rappers and musicians are incredible actors. Everyone is improvising and it came out really beautiful. We had Alexandre [Rodrigues], who played Rocket in City of God, for four hours and he played a preacher. There were no lines, he just kind of showed up and was like, “All right, I’m here, man.” It was a really beautiful experience to be able to create something with my friends over five years in a way that reminds me of Boyhood. This is like a five-year version of that.
Filmmaker: Similarly to your short If I Go Will They Miss Me, there are pronounced magical realist flourishes here, which miraculously don’t detract from the raw veracity of the narrative. What are some of the challenges of tempering fact with fiction?
Thompson-Hernández: That’s so foundational to my practice as a human, as an artist, as a filmmaker. I think we are always straddling this space between reality and fiction. Particularly for people of color like myself and my homies in Rio—or anywhere, really—we come from families of mythology. It’s such a big part of our practice as humans. I’m just like, “How do I lean into that in a way that feels grounded?” Seeing a Black man or woman with braids and wings smoking a cigarette on a rooftop, for me, feels outlandish, but also incredibly real and honest. What is reality and what is fiction? Everything to me just feels like a projection, anyways. I think I’m incredibly invested in a grounded surrealism, one that feels rooted to a character in the world, but that also helps us ask the question: Is this real or not? Ultimately, does it even matter?
Filmmaker: You’ve collaborated with cinematographer Michael “Cambio” Fernandez on several projects now. I’d love to know more about how you came to work together and how you approach a consensus on visual language.
Thompson-Hernández: He’s a cousin of mine, actually. It’s funny because he actually kind of got me into filmmaking. I didn’t go to film school, but I think my time at the Times transitioned me into filmmaking. Anyway, he showed up to my house here in L.A. on my birthday, and he brought me a Wong Kar-wai book. This beautiful, large, pictorial. exposé about his movies. In a sense, he was like, “I think it’s time for you to transition into filmmaking.” That was seven years ago, and that’s how we started collaborating. He’s older than me, so he’s been in the game a little longer and I feel like I’m just learning. But it’s been really cool because I have a really strong visual background, as well. I think we both have a similar ethos around how we are portraying bodies of color and positioning that in this history of image making—a brutal honesty that still feels poetic, interesting and novel. One thing I always tell them is that we should create our own references. I don’t make visual lookbooks for any of my movies. He doesn’t love that, because that’s his jam. But I’m drawing from nature and photography, I’m not drawing from other movies, per se. For me, discovery is the most interesting thing. I want to discover things that we didn’t plan for. My practice is guided by the spirit of jazz music. How are we all having our solos, but still coming together? How are we discovering tunes, beats and riffs that we didn’t know were possible?
Filmmaker: I’m curious how journalism and academia have shaped your artistic practice. I never studied film, but I do find that my background in Latin American studies or gender studies help me just as much with media analysis than a straight-forward film studies course may have. Do you feel similarly about not having gone to film school?
Thompson-Hernández: I used to be insecure about not going to film school. There’s a film grammar, vocabulary and history. I was like, “Oh shit, you know, am I competent enough?” But the New York Times, to me, felt like film school. I would travel around the world and have to write, shoot and produce all these stories about global subcultures for a few years. I think those qualities transition into filmmaking.
I was at the Sundance Directors Labs two years ago and it was the most beautiful experience of my life. It felt like film school. Michelle Satter, who runs Sundance [Institute’s Artist Programs], is like my film mom. She has my back so much. She and I were having dinner one night and I was telling her, “Sometimes I still feel insecure,” because everyone in my cohort that year went to NYU Tisch or USC. They were all taking photos together and sending them to their alumni page and shit. Michelle was like, “Nah, man. You don’t need film school. Film school would be lucky to have you.” I also would have probably spent so much time unlearning what I learned in film school, as opposed to just approaching everything with a beginner’s mindset and being curious.
I was also in a PhD program at UCLA for a year. I got a master’s in Latin American studies at Stanford. So my background in anthropology and critical race studies informs everything I do. Particularly as people of color, all the technical stuff we can learn. I’m literally on YouTube like, “How do you do this and that?” I feel like those technical barriers have kept us out for so long, but now we’ve got YouTube and it’s all possible.
Filmmaker: Are you still working on adapting If I Go into a feature? Can you share anything about the progress you’ve made on that project?
Thompson-Hernández: That’s what I’m actually editing right now. I’m the lead editor,a and I’ve never really edited a movie! I will say that we do have a supervising editor. His name is Affonso [Gonçalves], a Brazilian editor. He edited Beasts of the Southern Wild and is a master editor. So he’s helping, but I’m also just editing by myself.
When the short film won Sundance in 2022, I was living in Barcelona and working on the feature script. It was the first script I ever wrote, because I didn’t write a script for the short film and I didn’t write a script for Kites. So it’s been a process. We made the film in Los Angeles. We had Danielle Brooks as one of the leads, and she’s the best human ever. We had J. Alphonse Nicholson as another lead, who’s also incredible. We also had a lot of first time actors and in the same spirit, we had a shoestring budget. It was kind of a weird time. I feel like there was a lot of energy around supporting people of color—in 2020, 2021, 2022—and I felt like this film kind of came at a time when a lot of people were like, “Look, we supported that film, that film, that film. We’re kind of good on supporting people of color.”
I’m a scrappy person inherently, but I made it in my neighborhood where I grew up. For me, there was something beautiful and priceless about that. The production value feels very high, but we made it for a very low budget. I feel like that’s what me and my cousin kind of do. That’s our vibe. We had a producer named Josh Peters, who was a champion for the movie. He made my friend Sean Wang’s film, Didi and Rashad Frett’s film, Ricky. Rashad and Sean were actually my roommates at the Sundance Directors Lab.
But I’m in post for the movie right now. It’s really exciting. It was interesting having a production calendar and a schedule in ways that I haven’t had before.
Filmmaker: That sounds like a huge difference in terms of the way that you’ve worked before. Did you find any sort of tension in scaling up to this degree?
Thompson-Hernández: Yeah, that’s a good question. When I was a kid, I did graffiti for a lot of years. From when I was like 13 to 16, graffiti and street art was my life. I still come from that background of having no permit, not asking people if we could shoot there. That’s how we made Kites in Brazil: no permits, no nothing, super guerilla style. I always want to preserve that spirit. It doesn’t matter if the production is two hundred million or a thousand dollars. For me, the energy is the same. I think it’s so much fun to push boundaries and limits. I never want to lose that.
Filmmaker: Kind of a silly question, but I wonder how many physical kites you actually went through during production?
Thompson-Hernández: Oh my God, we had maybe 1,000 kites in five years. It’s interesting because we were filming in a favela called Santo Amaro, which is right in the heart of Rio. There are these huge misconceptions about favelas. Everyone thinks that they’re the most dangerous places in the world. The propaganda is so negative, but you walk inside of favelas and it is the most tight-knit community. There’s structure, order and safety. It’s actually a lot more dangerous outside of the favela, and the only times it gets dangerous is if the police come and shoot.
Actually we’re talking about permits, right? The only permit we ever got was every morning we had to go up to the top of favela and ask the actual boss for permission to film. There’s a scene when Duvo is getting his nails done and he’s on the phone. That’s how I met the favela boss, was when he was on the phone getting his nails done. My homie Alex, who’s from Rio, introduced me like, “This is Walter, he’s from Los Angeles, we’re making a movie here about kites.” Every day we had to ask him to film in his community. Every day he’d be like, “Yeah, it’s cool. Just buy the kids kites and sodas.” What I’m trying to say is we bought thousands of kites and a lot of sodas over five years.
Filmmaker: At the moment, are there any specific communities that you’re hoping to center in a future film?
Thompson-Hernández: I also have this other movie that I started in Barcelona last year. The working title is Spaceships. It’s about a young man from Senegal and this community of scrap metal collectors who are all first-generation immigrants living in Barcelona. It also features first-time actors and real-life stories. The story is really about what it looks like to want to go back home. They’re living in this sort of interstitial space where they can’t be citizens and exist in this weird, vulnerable place. The movie is about him and his friends collecting scrap metal every day, and what if they made a spaceship to go back home with that? We’re halfway through production. My commercial agency, a really cool company called Reverie, has been financing that. We’re going to finish that this summer after I edit If I Go.
