In the original script, the contemporary world wasn’t designed to puncture Armando’s story until the 90-minute mark. Mendonça Filho, though, moved it up and added a couple of key instances where the past and present, without knowing it, are in communion purely through the power of filmmaking. Fittingly, he does this inside a Recife cinema, where Armando describes how a Brazilian businessman dismantled his research department to the people trying to help hide him.

“There is one moment where the characters in 1977 stop talking because the audience is watching ‘The Omen,’ and they’re screaming,” Mendonça Filho said. “They just move their heads. Then, Flavia, in the future, she also stops, and she moves her head in the same direction. So there are different layers of editing and time. It’s a wonderful special effect, just the cut.”

The cut is one of the most inexpensive and powerful special effects in film. But Mendonça Filho uses it to bring the experience of watching the movie closer to the experience we have of living our lives, which are never as well-edited as a movie.

“I think there are far too many films which follow the logic of movies. But I think I can still make a movie with the logic of life. The logic of life means you can digress, you can stop the conversation — ‘oh, I just remembered something.’

There was a moment where Armando says, ‘Wait, I just told you the story in the wrong order,’” Mendonça Filho said. “That’s the logic of a real conversation, and maybe in some other film it would’ve been edited in more chronological way. But I really like the way Wagner delivers that conversation. You can see the machines going in his head, and he’s trying to remember things.”