Brazil’s Desvia Filmes Enters New Era With Doubled Focus on Indie and Rachel Daisy Ellis’ San Sebastián Co-Pro Forum’s Buzzy ‘The Last Cruise’

Very few production companies can boast about landing major international festival premieres for every project in their slate. Brazil’s Desvia Filmes is one of them, with all of its 16 features launching at festivals such as Berlin, Cannes, and Locarno.

Founded in 2010 by “The Blue Trail” director Gabriel Mascaro and British producer Rachel Daisy Ellis – who has long been based in Recife – Desvia is behind films such as Bruno Santamaría’s “Six Months In the Pink and Blue Building,” Benjamin Naishtat’s “Rojo,” Manuel Abramovich’s “Pornomelancholia” and all of Mascaro’s films, including “Divine Love” and “Neon Bull.”

Earlier this year, the company underwent a major transition, as Mascaro left Desvia to launch Trema alongside veteran producer Paula Cosenza. Trema will focus on international co-productions, scripted series and auteur-driven cinema with global reach, while Desvia will keep its laser-sharp focus on films, backing auteurs and filmmakers playing with form and genre.

Speaking with Variety out of San Sebastián, where she presented “The Last Cruise” at the festival’s prestigious Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum, Ellis reiterates how thrilled she is for Mascaro and Cosenza’s new venture and the opportunities it will open up for both companies.

“It’s one big portfolio of projects now split between two production companies, and amplified in this sense,” she says. “For many years, Desvia worked almost exclusively on Gabriel’s projects, especially because the two of us had a very strong creative partnership. We’ve reached incredible heights together, but had arrived at a moment when both of us wanted to branch out, so it was an organic process.”

The producer says she and Mascaro have “an incredible history together,” with “nothing stopping them” from working together again in the future. “For now, this setup makes it possible for him to work with new filmmakers, and for us at Desvia to bring new creative voices in.”

And, while Desvia is indeed bringing in new voices into its slate, it is also currently at full steam ahead with Ellis’s own directorial projects, which include the documentary short “The Book of Colors,” feature docs “Drone” and “The Dream Conference,” and “The Last Cruise.” The latter sees the director step into fiction, mixing doc elements with a fictionalized narrative to tell the story of an elderly couple who decides to forego a retirement home in favor of spending their last years on a cruise.

“It’s a project we’ve been researching for over two years, but I had the seed for the idea over 15 years ago,” she says. “I was in touch with someone from the British Council in Recife, who told me a crazy statistic: one of his main jobs was repatriation, and a lot of elderly Brits died on cruise ships, with their bodies being stored under the deck. He also told me a lot of retirees prefer to take one last big trip in life rather than settle into a care home, and many didn’t want to—or couldn’t—fly. So the option was a major around-the-world cruise.”

The producer wanted to make a documentary about the phenomenon at first and then, during the pandemic, she read an article about the growing phenomenon of people choosing to live in these lavish boats as it costs less than living in many major cities during a cost of living crisis. “Once I read that article, the original idea came back into my mind, and I was set on making it happen.”

Ellis has locked financing for production in Brazil, which was an important step given it is “not a cheap project.” The film requires her to follow a couple on a cruise for a year, with the subjects also filming themselves and their routine in this very particular environment.

“This first-person point of view is very much part of the way I work as a director,” she says of the creative choice. “It’s a way of having access to a layer of intimacy I otherwise wouldn’t be able to capture. I also realized this film is about love and companionship. ‘Eros,’ my previous film, was also about this, and I feel this film is a continuation of my interest in how people communicate with their partners when they live on the periphery of the norm.”

With Mascaro gone, long-term producing collaborator of Desvia, Camille Reis, became a partner and is now leading on several projects. Given Reis’s limited bandwidth, Ellis brought in renowned Argentinian producer Gema Juárez Allen (“Reas,” “Plaza Catedral”) to lead on “The Last Cruise,” with the duo seeking a co-production with Argentina.

“I worked with Gema before; we worked on ‘Pornomelancholia’ together, and when I invited her to produce the project, she loved the idea,” says Ellis. “It’s been incredible working with her, and this partnership as a producer is beautiful to me, because I know what it feels like to have an incredible producer by your side and how that changes the project. Once she boarded ‘The Last Cruise,’ I knew we would be good to go.”

As for the next steps with the company, the producer says they are “very focused on cinema.” “We haven’t had the drive to branch into TV or other formats. When I look back at all the projects I’ve worked on with Gabriel, and all the co-productions we’ve worked on, they are all very daring films, with a latent desire to provoke. This is something that attracts me both as a producer and director, and we want to continue to bring Desvia towards that pathway.”

And it is indeed an exciting pathway, with Desvia’s slate including Clarisa Navas’s “They Burn the Same Way,” which was a buzzy project at this year’s Venice Gap-Financing Bridge; Filipa Reis’ “Lontra,” a co-production with Portugal, Spain, France and Argentina; and “Who Named the Earth?” an exciting feature debut by Indigenous filmmaker Wara.