A Saga de Toninho Sagatiba, curation and press

The work has not been commercially exploited and has not been published on an open platform, because that would burn the premiere window at festivals. The pilot therefore circulates as a password protected screener, with no expiry date.

The screener is still to be issued. Until it is on this page, programmers, curators and journalists get the access straight from the production, together with the press material. There is no access code field here, because today no code would open it: a door that opens for no password is worse than no door.

The access code is sent by the production together with the press material. If you are a curator, a programmer or a journalist and have not received it yet, write to the contact at the end of this page.

Brazilian dramatic comedy in mockumentary form, built entirely out of testimony. Six interviewees in the pilot, ten in the first season, absurdist humor, and every voice belongs to the director himself.

The image in the pilot is entirely generated. There is no human cast on screen, there was no shooting day, and not one location in the film was filmed.

GPT Image 2 for sheets, stills and fixed images. Cinematic Studio Soul Location for sets. Seedance 2.0 for video and lip sync. Seed Audio 1.0 for the cloned voice. AssemblyAI for transcription and speech checking. ElevenLabs for ambiences and effects. ffmpeg for file handling, technical assembly and sound, from the first cut to the final file.

The testimonies use his original recordings, and the lip sync was built on top of them, respecting every stutter, every swallowed laugh and every sentence the improvisation left half finished. Nothing was cleaned up to sound tidier. Complementary passages use a clone generated from those same recordings, with documented consent. No third party voice was cloned.

What is human: script, direction, shot breakdown, editing and sound design.

This work is fiction. No interviewee represents a real person. Toninho Sagatiba is an invented character. The faces and bodies of the interviewees are generated and do not correspond to existing people. Material presented as period archive is of two kinds: real documentary footage in the public domain, identified as such, and generated reconstruction, which is not a historical record and must not be treated as one.

End credits and the transparency card on the use of artificial intelligence are already applied in a copy of its own, 524.9 seconds, with the previous file preserved alongside it.

Toninho Sagatiba was the most talked about man in a Zona Norte that maybe never existed like that. Nobody tells his life the same way twice. One day, out of nowhere, he vanished. In the pilot, six who stayed sit in front of a camera to say who he was. Bubu, the mother. Bianchi, the bar. Claudin, from gate 43, who collects from three people during his own interview. Penugi, fifty years of friendship. Palanque, from the church. Paráda, from the square. Each remembers a different Toninho, and remembers with absolute certainty. Nobody even agrees on which year it happened.

In the Zona Norte of São Paulo, between the ladeira, the botequim and the church, there was a man called Toninho Sagatiba. Or he existed only in the mouths that tell him, and nobody there separates the two.

On what he did, each swears to something different. He wrote songs on napkins and gave them away. He paid everybody's tab with money nobody could trace. He translated badly, and that was why they used him. He walked down the hill and did not come back. Nobody saw him go. Nobody found him after.

The series sits in front of whoever stayed. Six in the pilot. Bubu, the mother, who calls her son Carlinhos and will not hear a word against him. Bianchi, from the bar, who tells the same night differently every time. Claudin, from gate 43. Penugi, who teaches the nightlife like a trade. Palanque, from the church, who never smiles. Paráda, from the square, who plays Toninho's songs and says they are his. Four more in the season.

Each testimony contradicts the last with the same conviction. The dates do not close, the nicknames change owners, the same story happens in three places. The more people talk, the less the series knows who is lying. That is the problem. The neighborhood is not remembering a man, it is keeping one alive.

The mother has paid thirty years on a phone line that never rings, because he might call. The series is not about the man who vanished. It is about the ones who kept waking up on that street.

One author, alone in São Paulo, made a mockumentary about a neighborhood legend using his own voice for every character. The characters were not written, they were recorded: phone voice messages, improvised over months to make a friend laugh, before there was any project. The performance does not sound performed because it was not performed. The image was built afterwards, on top of a performance that had already existed for years.

Because the film is about memory, and memory is exactly what this technology does: it does not record, it invents a plausible version. Toninho is a man who exists only in other people's mouths. There is no photograph, there is no body, and nothing was left behind. If I cast an actor, I would be giving him a body the whole story denies. Generating is the only way to keep the hole in the middle of the film. The people who talk contradict each other because memory contradicts itself. The archive is false because every legend's archive is false: somebody always reconstructs it afterwards. And the voices come out of my throat because that is how a causo works in Brazil, one guy alone at a bar table doing everybody's voice.

If I had the budget for a cast and for locations, I would still do it this way.

The production's contact address has not been published on this page yet. As soon as it is, it appears in the block above, as a real address, clickable.