The weight: directing the film now up for a VMA

Manuel Nogueira on Vila Mogol, a producer on a borrowed motorcycle, and what the project cost.

There is a guy with a mustache and a way of wearing clothes that makes you think he is either about to ride somewhere or just got back. Felipe Britto. Producer. He showed up to set on a motorcycle that wasn’t his. He needed to get there and that was the vehicle available, so he rode it. You call, he answers, and the next day, sometimes the same day, he is in another city. In the room. In the middle of the problem.

Sounds small. If you have ever produced anything in your life, you know it isn’t.

EQUILIBRIVM is Anitta’s eighth studio album. A visual album in four chapters, filmed entirely in Vila Mogol, a village of twenty-five people in the mountains of Minas Gerais, inside the Ibiti forest project. Candomblé, samba, axé, MPB, funk. Spiritual in intention. One of the music videos from the project is now running for Best Latin at the 2026 MTV Video Music Awards.

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I directed the films. Nídia Aranha built the conceptual universe it lives inside: the spiritual grammar, the chapters, the symbols. My job was to find what that should look like, moment by moment, frame by frame. To make it beautiful. I say that plainly because clarity about what you are actually there to do is the only thing that holds when everything else is moving.

Felipe produced this project from the inside out. He lived in the distance between concept and execution. He carried the whole structure with the kind of steadiness most people mistake for calm, and which is actually the result of having done the impossible before, slowly enough that you stop fearing it. What we made wouldn’t exist without him.

Carol Sentelhas was my creative producer and assistant director. She knows me. She comes over: “I know you really want to shoot it this way, but we don’t have time, it’s raining and we have a lot to cover.” I look back at her in silence. She concludes herself: “We’ll try, I know.” That is the whole job, sometimes. Someone who reads the room and reads you at the same time.

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Juliano Lopes was our DOP. What Juliano does is read a place. He reads what a place is trying to say and then finds the light that says it with more intention, already imagining the colour correction. Sometimes it looks too simple. In the end it is perfect.

Directing, I find more and more, is consistency. Resilience. Inner peace, when you can hold it. Being present.

To be present you have to dilute yourself into the environment, the story, the others. That is anti-ego work. Attention to details nobody will consciously notice and everybody will feel. The final output is a sensation. It has to leave a mark. Like a great restaurant: some people repeat the same recipe and don’t arrive at the same place. What in the final piece, when people press play, is really giving energy and staying in their hearts? I don’t think any rational discussion can fully answer that. But it exists, and my work lives there.

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Then there is Anitta. She held the energy of this entire project without letting anyone quit. She made the work feel like it mattered, deeply and visibly, and that belief is contagious in a way no management can replicate. She imagined this world. We all built it together.

There is a bigger current under this. For most of my life, Latin music travelled north only after translating itself. That stopped. The charts learned Spanish, then started learning Portuguese. Anitta carried a VMA home in 2022 singing the way she sings at home. A visual album rooted in candomblé, filmed in a village of twenty-five people, now stands in that same room, and nobody asked it to translate anything first.

None of this was efficient. Several times I thought it wouldn’t come together. It did.

People ask what directing taught me about running a company, and for years I gave clever answers. The honest one: a set is leadership with the makeup off. You cannot delegate presence. Everyone can see, in real time, whether you are actually deciding or just moving. The team can live without your certainty. What it cannot live without is you, there, holding the frame while it shakes.

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I remember a text I like about how, if you spend an hour on a geometry problem and at the end you are no closer, you have still made progress in another, more mysterious dimension. The people who can hold that, who stay in the room when the room offers nothing back, come out different.

That is who made this project. That is what it cost.