‘It’s important to us that desire wins’: Marcio Reolon and Filipe Matzembacher on ‘Night Stage’

Brazilian co-directors Marcio Reolon and Filipe Matzembacher (the Teddy Award-winning writer-director duo of Hard Paint, 2018) returned to the Berlinale this year with Night Stage (2025, Ato Noturno), a potent cocktail of melodrama, eroticism, and social satire.

Matias (Gabriel Faryas) is a queer, dark-skinned stage actor with great ambitions. His flatmate, Fabio (Henrique Barriera), has them too. Straight, white, and chiseled, Fabio is scouted for a major new series that’s set to shoot in their city of Porto Alegre—he’s deemed a perfect fit, but Matias ambitiously enters into a game of tug-of-war for the role. When night falls, he also pursues an app hookup with a new sexual partner, Rafael (Cirillo Luna). The pair are discreet in their meetings at first, but they quickly push further into a seductive world of public sex and the threat of discoverability. Rafael has much to lose, too—he’s a closeted politician running for mayor. Standing by as this unfolds, unravels, and undulates is Camilo (Ivo Müller), a political fixer who will do anything to stop the affair from seeing the light of day.

Night Stage had its UK premiere over the weekend as the closing night film—and, dare we say, climax—of the 2025 BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival. Purple Hour sat down with Reolon and Matzembacher to discuss performance, ambiguous sexuality, and the necessity of desire triumphing over neoliberalism.

Purple Hour: I want to start by discussing the film’s title. “Night” and “stage” are two separate concepts that interact and affect each other in this film, and you capture these outdoor rendezvous with a rather stage-theatrical framing. Tell me about those two sides of the film.

Marcio Reolon: We like this idea of danger that the night brings—and also of secrecy. With the stage, there’s the performance side of it. These two characters are also actors in life. One’s a stage actor and the other is a politician, but both of them play these public personas—they’re in a constant performance on the street. It was very appealing to us to create these visual plateaus where the characters would be staging moments in a way that was more composed. Night Stage sums up these ideas of the theatrical and danger. Also, we find it sexy. There’s a seduction to it.

Filipe Matzembacher: Discussing the possibilities for this film, we thought back on our previous film, Hard Paint, which also creates this dichotomy and duality. The characters seek the spotlight, but they also shouldn’t.

There are many competing ingredients in this creative cocktail. You’ve got closeted public figures, a public sex fetish, and an exploration of unequal treatment based on racial and queer characteristics in public-facing industries. Which of these strands was the catalyst for the project?

MR: We wanted to investigate performance again but this time in a different direction. The starting point was these two people pressured to perform specific lives to achieve what they want. We had a strong will to make a film about queer people dodging bullets, venturing the nights through sex—being in danger, but also killing and being horny—in the hope that the audience, by watching it, would also feel in danger and horny. That was the seed of this project.

It’s always two men at the centre of your films, but in Night Stage you have multiple pairings, which create a web of tensions.

FM: These other two characters, Fabio and Camilo, are important because they materialise this threat of exposure—or enclosure. There’s one shot that we really love that represents this idea. Matias and Rafael are seated, talking, and then we have Fabio on one side of the frame and Camilo on the other. It’s the only scene where you see the four of them together.

MR: It’s almost like those two straight characters are constraining the queer characters in the middle, and they represent different facets of that oppression. Fabio is this chill dude who is super supportive. However, he does not accept when he loses space that he feels he has earned. Camilo is the brute force that is funded to keep the machine going. Of course, homophobia plays some role in it, but it’s more that they act on these matters because of the capitalist structure. That’s a big part of the engine that we envision for this film.

When Matias and Fabio are up on stage climbing along the overhanging piece of set, they’re huffing and grunting—it’s homoerotic. And they’re in a “bottoming” position, which mirrors the later shot of public sex by the car. Later, when Camilo pulls out a gun, he does so from the front of his pants. He could almost be reacting sexually to that cruising scenario. So you do toy with queer potentiality in your straight characters.

MR: Absolutely. For us, [sexuality] wasn’t something that was established. We discussed the character of Camilo with the actor, Ivo, and we acknowledged this possibility. However, we left it to him to make the decision, and we never questioned what that decision was. We don’t know what he decided. What interests us is that each [actor or viewer] would create their own interpretation of it.

FM: There are two major forces in this film: desire and money. It’s important to us that desire wins. That’s what we believe—that it’s a stronger, more important force in life than money. When desire goes into high tension in the end, all the characters start to lose it a bit. I think that Camilo goes in that direction as well. The film is contaminated by this desire. It affects all the characters, all the scenes.

What filmmakers influenced your approach to this film? I thought of Pedro Almodóvar, I thought of Alain Guiraudie—I thought of various directors that have a murkiness to their explorations of queer desire.

MR: Almodóvar was never a direct inspiration to us. Of course, we admire him deeply and are always flattered when people make this comparison. Guiraudie—for sure. To us, he’s one of the most interesting filmmakers active today. [He explores] danger and desire in such beautiful ways. Desire makes his characters go nuts in a way also. When we realised that we wanted to make an erotic thriller, we went to directors that we deeply admire such as [Brian] De Palma and [Paul] Verhoeven. Digging back further, [Alfred] Hitchcock.

FM: The erotic thriller as a genre is strongly heterosexual and masculine. It was important to subvert it, to take this genre that we always had fun watching growing up, and update it to our queer reality to what made sense to us—something queer, Brazilian, 2025. There’s one film that was very important: a Brazilian film called República dos Assassinos, by Miguel Faria Jr. It’s a queer noir from the ‘70s with a trans woman femme fatale. It’s a masterpiece.

The performance of your lead actor, Gabriel Faryas, is incredible. He’s got a gaze and movement to him that’s at once very piercing, but also slippery and hard to pin down.

MR: Gabriel was a joy to work with. We did an open call for this film, and we got over 1,000 applicants [including] big, well-known actors in the country. When we met Gabi, we were really taken by his acting, but also his persona. We matched in political views, in artistic interests, and we just bonded. We could see Matias in him as we had envisioned. He has this angelic look, which can be at once captivating and tricky.

FM: He’s a femme fatale. In the past, the femme fatale would deviate the main character from the family and the traditional role of a “good” person. With our film, it’s actually both of [Matias and Rafael] that act as femme fatales. They each [simultaneously] wish to be part of the system and are the femme fatale that’s taking [the other] out of their journey—but for, I believe, a good reason.

For Matias, was the race of the character written in the script from the start? It feels core to the film.

FM: It’s something that we had on our minds. We hadn’t decided 100%, but we knew the implications it would bring to the story. It’s not just two actors fighting for a role—it’s one Black and one white actor, one queer and one straight. There’s the performance of their gender as well. One is more masculine and the other one is more feminine, flamboyant. We were very open to collaborating with Gabi in this sense, because he thinks a lot about race in his work, and he’s also a visual artist.

I love the film’s ending. It’s a moment of freeing sexual anarchy, a tongue-in-cheek middle finger of sorts—and you’ve got this thumping techno music that leads us into the credits. That moment reminded me a lot of last year’s Challengers [by Luca Guadanigno]. Was that film a conscious reference point? Or are we, in general, entering into this very cool era of sexually explosive erotic thrillers?

MR: Guadagnino’s Challengers? Absolutely not.

FM: But I have to say, I love the soundtrack of that film. I understand the connection because this idea of this explosion of desire was very important to the end. The climax should feel like a cumshot. It would feel that this power was what, in the end, defeated the other forces of the film.

MR: We see the film’s ending as a “happy ending”. These two characters felt throughout their journey that they had to succeed in this neoliberal world of capitalist achievement. They moulded who they were in life to fit the expectations of society and of those specific power dynamics. In the end, they go: okay, fuck that. We’re not gonna give up who we are and our desires because of this anymore. We love how the ending unfolds into an absurd situation. One has a gunshot on the leg, the other one just killed someone. But they’re like, “No, we’re not leaving this without finishing what we came here to do.” Even though they are being caught by society. Their faces will be all over the news. Rafael will likely lose the election. Matias will likely lose the role. Their desires are their priority now.

FM: It’s also like their last performance in the film. They’re seated in a way that’s almost staged for theatre—the flashlights also.

What do you want this film to leave your audiences with?

MR: We want people to want to live life, to want to go to the party, to want to fuck. This sense of urgency in life is something that really drove us during the process. I want them to cheer for these characters and have an orgasm with them. It’s about embracing desire and having fun. If you’re up for that, I think you’re our audience.