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| Kites |
Director Walter Thompson-Hernandez's feature début, Kites revolves around 25-year-old Duvo. Living in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, his young life has been entrenched in the city's gang culture. Thompson-Hernandez marries realism with the magical, when a guardian angel named Phil, who was a victim of police violence, appears to Duvo. It offers the young man an opportunity of redemption, which coincides with a community kite festival.
Since making the transition from being on the global subculture beat for The New York Times, which took him around the world, Thompson-Hernandez has directed the short film, If I Go They Will Miss Me, about a boy obsessed with the mythological figure of Pegasus and whose imagination colours his reality. He also directed an episode of the sports documentary Untold. His episode, Shooting Guards, told the story of a gambling dispute between NBA Washington Wizards players Gilbert Arenas and Javaris Crittenton, who drew guns on one another in the locker room.
In conversation with Eye For Film, Thompson-Hernandez discussed democratising the filmmaking process and his pursuit of honesty. He also reflected on his own personal journey, discovering poetic tones and loving Kites in spite of its imperfections.
Paul Risker: A director's first narrative feature is a milestone moment. How do you look back on the experience of making Kites?
Walter-Thompson Hernández: It feels good. That's my first narrative feature and the most interesting aspects of the movie are obviously some of the performances and how it was shot, and the poetry that's so deeply embedded into the movie. It often feels more like a feature-length poem than it does a feature-length movie.
So, it feels good, and it's a movie that took us five years to make with no script. Every piece of dialogue is improvised and how it was made feels a lot more interesting than where it was made. It was made with a bunch of friends, and we didn't have any financing. So, making movies, this is an experience that I don't think I will ever have again, and because of that, it feels really special.
PR: How did approaching Kites in a non-traditional way shape the film and define it beyond telling a story?
WTH: What made it so incredibly exciting was not having a script, which meant fully trusting our first-time actors. We got to see them imagine roles that they often created and wrote themselves. There's something really beautiful about that — this democratising of filmmaking. There is usually this inherent power structure where writers and directors take charge of how characters move through the world and what they can say. And for me, it was practicing a complete release of control and ego, right?
It was just really beautiful how my friends performed and acted out versions of lives that they already lead or intimately know. As a person from Los Angeles, I'm fluent in Portuguese, and I've spent a lot of time in Brazil. Everyone in the movie is a dear friend of mine. How weird it would have been to travel to a neighbourhood like that and essentially tell people what to say and how to move their bodies. So, it was a really beautiful exercise and collaboration in every sense of the word.
PR: Fully trusting the actors creates a safe space where vulnerability can be nurtured and allows something genuine to emerge.
WTH: That's the perfect word. It is genuine, and another word is "honest." Duvo, Thiago, Larissa and Pedroza — those are their real names and their names on screen. And so, if someone says this feels like a documentary, the younger version of my filmmaker self would be offended by that. But now, that is the highest praise and it's absolutely true.
Duvo is playing a version of himself, and Larissa and Duvo, the main love interests, are a couple in real life — it often felt like we were documenting their real lives. There's so much trust, and it was such a beautiful learning experience for all of us. I didn't go to film school. Instead, this felt like my film school, and it felt like an anti-western approach in every sense of the word.
PR: It's difficult not to take things personally when you're the mind behind anything creative. It's necessary to embrace the journey where you begin to perceive yourself and your work from different perspectives. I'm curious why your younger self would have taken offence.
WTH: Before filmmaking, I was a journalist at The New York Times for some years, where my beat was global subculture. So, I used to travel around the world and for every story, I would write, photograph, direct, and produce. I kind of did everything, and so, it was almost like a film school, right?
I left The New York Times and started to do fictional narrative work. When I showed people earlier versions of Kites, two or three years ago, their first question was, "Is this a documentary?"
Transitioning from documentary to narrative work, I wanted to establish myself as a narrative filmmaker. I would be sensitive and defensive and take offence. I'd say, "No. What makes you think this is a documentary?" Now, if I'm asked that, I know that I've succeeded as a filmmaker, and my first response is a smile and "No."
What that's telling me is that it feels so lifelike, and there's so much texture in the world that it feels incredibly honest. So, that question is the highest praise. I didn't think that three or four years ago when I was transitioning from documentary to narrative filmmaking. But now, I think it's a beautiful compliment.
PR: Thinking about your journalism background, is it necessary to accept that we carry certain experiences with us, that are an important and inseparable part of who we are?
WTH: We all have ideas about how our art should feel, how it should look and how it should resonate with people. Or even if you are a narrative filmmaker, you are supposed to work in one way and if you're a documentarian, you should work in another way.
But to your point, there's no way I can shake my professional and personal past. I was also in grad school in a PhD program for a year studying anthropology — there's no way for me to escape that. Now I have learned to embrace it and to accept it all, and I think it's coming out in the movies that I'm making.
PR: When did cinema and storytelling first make an impression that led to it becoming a significant part of your life?
WTH: I grew up in the same house as my aunt, my mother's sister. They were both studying at UCLA at the same time, and my aunt majored in Italian studies. So, most Fridays and Saturdays she would bring home all the Italian post-war neorealist classics, like Bicycle Thieves, Rome, Open City, and The Battle Of Algiers. These are all films that I love to this day. And so, for me, that has always been the reference for filmmaking, as well as films like 8½. This is where it began and, as a child, I was always drawn to the kind of cinema that blends social realism with fantasy and surrealism. And I think I'm still drawn to that to this day.
The Seventh Seal is one of my favourite movies of all time, and Kites is essentially a version of that. It's not death, it's a guardian angel that our main character is having a conversation with. And the movie feels incredibly existential. So, for me, it was about what a marriage between The Seventh Seal and something Terrence Malik would make, and then a film like City Of God? What would that look like? I don't think we've ever seen a poetic interpretation of life in favelas in Brazil. It's usually very singular, and it's about violence, death, and crime. Kites touches on that, but there's also poetry in it all, which we did a great job of capturing.
PR: Do you mean visual poetry?
WTH: There's obviously the visual poetry of it all, and there's also a more subdued and quieter poetry that exists in the banal and the mundane. There's something beautiful about seeing a young man getting his nails done in a nail shop, as you see in Kites. There's something beautiful about kids walking up to an açaí shop and buying sodas. It's so banal, it's so mundane, but I find poetry in that, and it feels really beautiful.
PR: You've spoken about not working from a script and the poetic qualities of Kites. Digging deeper into your process, how do you approach the audiovisual nature of a film?
WTH: I always think about what a movie sounds like before I think about what it looks like — sonically, and in terms of sound texture. That's the most important thing for me. We can fool our eyes, but we can never turn our ears off — they are incredibly sharp. And so, it's about what does this world sound like before asking what it looks like?
If anybody has spent any time in favelas, they are dynamic places. There are so many sounds, smells, and textures. So, diegetically, I wanted a lot of the sound to organically come from the world. During the film, we hear a lot of different sounds, and even the incredibly persistent kite festival announcement that we hear throughout the film feels like such an honest part of it. There's also music and a score, and it all just fits together well.
PR: There's an innocence associated with flying kites, and they can be interpreted as a metaphor of freedom. In your film they're not just randomly chosen. Instead, they're chosen to enhance certain themes and ideas.
WTH: There's a multigenerational element in these kites that reminds us of purity and innocence. Whether we're children who still fly kites or whether we're adults who once flew them, there's something really special and almost magical. And there's also simplicity in flying a kite. You don't need much, especially in Brazil. They're made out of bamboo and paper — there's not much there, but there's also so much there.
So, the kites, for me, symbolise this sense of freedom, manumission, and hope. Every time you fly a kite, it's an exercise in hope, and this movie ends with Duvo's kite festival. It's a kite festival which arguably he may not have ever seen, but it lives on beyond his life. And so, it's the existential question of life and death. If Duvo's kite festival, his good deed, lives on, does he even die? And that's a question I have about humanity and our lives here on Earth. Will our deeds outlive our physical bodies?
PR: Reflecting on how divisive and xenophobic the world currently is, it feels that art is needed to create empathy and remind us how we are all connected.
WTH: That's what's so interesting when I think about Kites. It's so specific to a young man's life in Brazil and a favela. However, there are these broader universal questions, and I'd ask anybody who lives in the world to ask themselves, "Will my deeds outlive my physical body? Am I capable of redemption? Am I being protected by some force or a guardian angel?" These are all questions we ask on a day-to-day basis, and a movie like Kites helps us see that we're essentially not alone.
And that's why we can see ourselves in this main character. It's almost like you want to grab him by the shoulders and say, "Hey, it's okay. You're doing your best." We all want to tell him that, and we all feel for him when he passes away. But also, I hope the ending, this kite festival, gives us some solace about his life.
PR: A director told me that the person you are before you start a film is different to the person you are when you finish a film. Is filmmaking a transformative experience for you personally?
WTH: A lot has happened in the last five years of my life and also in the world. When I watch this movie, it's a time stamp for a specific time — how I was thinking about the world in 2020 when we started this movie. What was I afraid of? What did I hope for? It's such a beautiful timestamp.
I just watched it at Tribeca, and it feels like an unpolished movie. There's a lot of rawness there, and I've made two films since. I'm editing my next feature literally here in front of this computer. And so, watching Kites, it's an imperfect movie. It's unpolished, but there's something special and raw in that I probably won't get the chance to ever do that again. And I love it because of that.
Kites had its world premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival.
