Trash talk at Festival do Rio

Published in 10/06/2014

One of the international highlights of Festival do Rio has been the world premiere of Stephen Daldry's contemporary thriller Trash that took place on Tuesday, 7 October at the Cinépolis Lagoon. Daldry was accompanied by the Brazilian cast (the film was shot in Rio) including local superstars Wagner Moura and Selton Mello, as well as screenwriters Richard Curtis and Felipe Braga.

In Trash two trash-picking boys from the Rio slums find a wallet in amongst the daily detritus of their local dump. Little do they imagine that their lives are about to change forever. But when the local police show up, offering a handsome reward for the wallet's return, the boys, Rafael and Gardo, realize that what they've found must be more important than they thought.

At last year's festival Daldry presented his film Billy Elliot to children at a special screening of Mostra Geracão in the Complexo do Alemão. As a result of that screening the Latin American Travel Association Foundation in the UK raised enough money in partenrship with Las Iguanas restaurants to kit out a new dance studio for Projecto Vidancar that helps the Complexo's budding Billy Elliots (boys and girls), some of whom have already graduated to the ballet school of the Theatro Municipal.

Trash is a Working Title production in partnership with PeaPie, O2 Filme and Universal Pictures. Working Title, which has amongst its back catalogue the award winning documentary Senna, has a long history with Brazil One of the company's very first productions, back in 1985, was Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Laundrette and that film won the Golden Toucan as best film at the third FestRio.

Daldry, who has been nominated three times for an Oscar, topped the UK box office chart last week, but not with Trash, rather with Billy Elliot the Musical Live. It was the first time a cinema "event" release had topped the UK charts. Beamed live to 553 screens, the show took in $3.1 million in the evening,