Mars One
2022 · Gabriel Martins
A middle-class Black family in Brazil copes with the election of a far-right extremist president. The mother believes that she's cursed after an unexpected encounter, while her husband puts all of his hopes into their son's soccer career.
dir. Gabriel Martins · 2022
On the eve of Brazil's 2018 election, as a far-right president ascends, a Black working-class family on the Belo Horizonte periphery tends four separate dreams: the father stakes everything on his son's football trials, the mother fights off a premonition of ruin, the daughter edges toward a new love and a new life, and the boy himself stares past all of it toward the stars — specifically, the Mars One colonization project of the title. Gabriel Martins is a founding member of Filmes de Plástico, the collective from Contagem, Minas Gerais, that has spent a decade making tender, unhurried films about Black life far from Rio's postcards and favela clichés. His signature is warmth without softness: neon-tinged night photography, an ambling ensemble rhythm, politics held at the edge of the frame — which is where families actually experience it. Brazil chose it as its Oscar submission, a small, pointed act of national self-description in a bruising year.
Lines of influence
- No Coração do Mundo (2019) — Martins's own prior Filmes de Plástico feature using the same multi-strand ensemble structure to weave Black working-class lives across Contagem into a single social fabric.
- Temporada (2018) — Shares the collective's patient, near-documentary observational rhythm that lets long-held everyday scenes of Black civil-servant life accrue meaning without dramatic underlining.
- Ela Volta na Quinta (2015) — Established the Filmes de Plástico method of casting non-professional family members as a domestic ensemble, the naturalistic performance grammar Mars One's household inherits.
- O Som ao Redor (Neighboring Sounds) (2012) — Model for the class-stratified multi-strand Brazilian ensemble in which political tension and menace are staged at the frame's edge rather than spoken.
- Bacurau (2019) — Extends the same practice of letting a national political backdrop (here Bolsonaro-era Brazil) seep into ordinary community life until it distorts the mundane.
- Killer of Sheep (1978) — Founding template for episodic neorealist portraiture of a Black working-class family, finding dignity and lyricism in unhurried domestic and labor routines.
- Moonlight (2016) — James Laxton's saturated neon-and-streetlight night palette that renders Black interior and familial life with tenderness rather than grit—the same chromatic night photography Mars One favors.
- Medicine for Melancholy (2008) — Low-key Black-led relationship realism built from small quotidian encounters, using muted daytime tones against pockets of urban neon.
- Roma (2018) — Latin American domestic-and-labor family portrait that pushes political unrest to the literal edges of the frame while foregrounding household intimacy.
- The Florida Project (2017) — Social-realist ensemble of economically precarious lives filtered through a child's aspirational fantasy set against candy-neon exteriors.
- Atlantics (2019) — Braids working-class aspiration with premonition and the uncanny over a political-economic backdrop, wrapped in atmospheric neon night imagery.
- Vidas Secas (Barren Lives) (1963) — Cinema Novo's neorealist attention to a poor family's endurance and thwarted aspiration, the Brazilian social-realist tradition Mars One updates.
- Tokyo Story (1953) — Low-camera, elliptical family drama whose unhurried editing rhythm builds a portrait of generational aspiration and quiet disappointment.
- Fish Tank (2009) — Intimate handheld social realism organized around a working-class teenager's aspiration (dance) as an escape route from a constrained household.
- Pariah (2011) — Bradford Young's expressive neon and colored-gel night cinematography deployed over a Black family drama of a young person's self-becoming.
- Do the Right Thing (1989) — Heat-saturated color and block-level ensemble staging in which everyday community life quietly carries a political charge that could ignite.
Appears in courses