Monika Treut met Yvonne Bezerra de Mello a few years ago, through mutual friends in New York City. “Upon meeting her I knew I had to make a film about her,” says Treut, whose previous films have examined the lives of sexual nonconformists. Treut says she was immediately taken with de Mello’s courage and complexity: educated at the Sorbonne and the wife of a wealthy businessman, de Mello has spent 20 years working with poor children in Rio de Janeiro. “She leads a double life in Brazil because she’s part of the upper class there, but she works with poor people in the slums, the favelas. That’s something very unusual, because in Brazil the upper class pretends people in the favelas are thieves and drug dealers and have nothing to do with them at all.”
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She says the new film, Warrior of Light, is no tamer than her previous work, just “more directly political.” She and de Mello attended its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival last month, where she had hoped to land a distributor. But the screening took place two days after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. “The festival almost stopped,” Treut says. “A lot of buyers just left after Tuesday. I understand that perfectly well. Yvonne and I were glued to the TV set. We were not in the mood to go to movies for the first few days.”
