12 Mar An interview with Carolina Liz, director of “ When We Were Us”
BIO
Carolina Liz is a Brazilian actress and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, with Italian and Japanese heritage. She is an award-winning performer whose work has been recognized at multiple festivals throughout her career.
On stage, her most recent work was in the production Witch by Jen Silverman, directed by Jenn O’Brien, where she portrayed Winnifred. Her performance showcased her versatility and strong presence in contemporary theater.
On screen, Carolina played Beatriz in Auder, a short film that gained significant international recognition. The project broke barriers across borders, earning awards and critical acclaim at international festivals.
Carolina is dedicated to telling stories that connect cultures, inspire, and move audiences. One of her main goals is to bring greater visibility, representation, and voice to female characters, contributing to a more inclusive and authentic audiovisual world.
The film uses a drug to suppress pain as a central plot device. Do you see this as a metaphor for our modern society’s obsession with avoiding discomfort through technology and instant gratification?
Totally. I think our society fears feeling things and that’s why we always try to escape or distract ourselves with something. With this dystopian world, where this anti depressive helps you be apathetic towards heartbreak, I wanted the audience to question if they would do the same if we had the opportunity.
In When We Were Us, Leoni and Duda face a choice: to feel or to forget. In your view as a writer, is human identity defined more by our traumas or by our joys? If we erase the pain, is there anything left of the original person?
Definitely traumas. We tend to register and remember only the bad things. We think pain is the worst we could feel, so we do anything to avoid it. But there’s the good side of pain, the side that we learn from it, we heal from it and we know what we want as humans, and I think if we try to avoid it 100% we’ll never grow.
Creating a sci-fi world with a $2,000 budget requires immense creativity. How did these financial constraints shape the visual language of the film? Did you embrace minimalism to keep the story grounded and believable?
Writing this piece to me was personally one of my biggest accomplishments because there wasn’t really a way of telling this story without the art department. With this (not a lot) amount of budget, we had to create another parallel universe. The clothes were mostly donated to the movie or they belonged to the actors. Obviously when I was still writing, I wanted it to be bigger and from that, the producer Catarina Bijotti and I, we saw what was possible and what wasn’t.
Carolina, as both director and lead actress, how did you balance the internal process of acting with the external demands of directing? How did you and Ramoile (Duda) build that specific chemistry needed to make the romance feel authentic?
It was very challenging being both because I felt like there wasn’t really someone in every scene with me directing my acting. We got help from Larissa da Matta, an amazing actress and director for some scenes and that was extremely helpful, but in general I did feel a little bit insecure with myself. Gladly, Ramoile and I, we had a lot of rehearsals and he was always open to meet up and talk about the scenes and create our chemistry.
What are you currently working on?
Right now, I just finished co-writing Miss Porcelana, another short film that is going to talk about the Miss Brasil competition and how we still need diversity, even these days. It’s going to be produced by Laura Medeiros and directed by Gabriela Ono.