On Listening to Cecílio

Conducting this interview with Cecílio Elias Neto was, without exaggeration, one of the most moving moments in the entire process of making the documentary Piracicaba Never Forgot. It was already something remarkable to sit before such a significant figure for the city, with his generous, lucid gaze and his deep passion for Piracicaban culture and memory. But what touched me most profoundly was the tenderness with which he spoke of cinema. Of his life with cinema.

With every answer, it felt as though I travelled back in time, not through data or archives, but through felt time. Living time. Cecílio spoke of the city’s cinemas as one might speak of beloved people, sacred places of childhood and youth. From the Cine Broadway to the São José, from the Politeama to the Palácio, each cinema carried not only films, but romances, friendships, fashions, historic tragedies, fears and hopes. I recall fondly the moment he recounted, still as a boy, queuing at the Cine Broadway while the world feared its end after Hiroshima. That image has stayed with me: the fear of the end of the world, and at the same time, people still going to the cinema. Because art is a refuge.

Cecílio told everything with impressive clarity, but also with the light humour of someone who has learnt to laugh at life. Among so many stories, he laughed about his cinematic loves, the films he saw with his mother-in-law and future wife, the scoldings from the ushers, the matinées in suits. He even laughed about his youthful jealousy of Ava Gardner marrying Frank Sinatra. Yet behind every laugh there was always genuine affection, for the films, for the cinemas, for what it all meant in his life.

The interview was long, and could easily have gone on. When he said that, to talk about cinema, it would be better at a bar table, with beer and a caipirinha, I knew at once that here was not only a fine storyteller, but also a true friend of memory. And it is that kind of friendship that has always driven me to create Piracicaba Never Forgot: the desire not to let these stories slip through the cracks of time. To listen, calmly and carefully, to what the silent walls of old cinemas can still tell us, through voices such as Cecílio’s.

His words, when he compared the past to the roots of a tree, touched me deeply. “If the root dies, everything there dies,” he said. And I felt, more than ever, that this project is about preserving those roots. Not out of nostalgia, but out of gratitude. So that those who come after may also know where the flowers, the leaves and the fruits of this city came from. Listening to Cecílio was like watching a rare film, one you must hold carefully in memory and in the heart. A blend of chronicle, poetry, journalism and affection. A lesson in what it means to live with passion, and to keep that passion alive for decades.

I left the interview with one certainty: as long as there are people like Cecílio, and as long as we are willing to listen with the same care with which he spoke, Piracicaba Never Forgot will continue to be much more than a documentary. It will always be an act of love.

Dara Oliver