Ella Rumpf, Júlio Andrade, Ana Flávia Cavalcanti to Star in Locarno Winner Andrea Staka’s ‘Ibicaba: O Paraíso Prometido’ for MyMama Entertainment (EXCLUSIVE)
I keep thinking about the title. Ibicaba was a real coffee plantation, and the promise of paradise to European settlers turned out to be something closer to indentured servitude. That gap between what people are sold and what they find has a way of echoing forward. Štaka's previous films have been quiet, character-driven pieces about displacement, so this feels like a natural escalation of scale.
The casting of Ella Rumpf is the part I'm most curious about. She made her name in Raw with something feral and unapologetic. To see her in a period piece about 19th century migration suggests she's looking for range, or that Štaka sees something in her that horror never got to use.
I'd want to know more about the actual history here. The Swiss were among the first groups brought to Ibicaba in the 1850s, and their letters home eventually led Switzerland to ban recruitment of emigrants to Brazil. That's a story with real teeth. Whether the film leans into the horror of the deception or the melancholy of the dream, it's the kind of history that rarely gets told outside academic circles.