The Brazilian filmmaker who is filming a documentary while searching in Ecuador for her father she never knew

In Rio de Janeiro, during the 1970 World Cup, a young Ecuadorian man with a Brazilian woman had a relationship for a couple of months. The woman became pregnant and the Ecuadorian told her that she could not continue with her. From that moment on, he disappeared. Half a century later, Susanna Lira, the Brazilian filmmaker resulting from that relationship, set out to find her father.

Susanna talked to Infobae at a hotel in Quito. She had barely been in the city for three days, but Lira had already begun to feel something she had been looking for a long time: a connection to her origins. “It identified me with Ecuadorian women,” she says. Now Lira has combined her search with her profession and, while following the trail of her father, she is recording her new documentary “Nothing about my father”.

Lira is a renowned Brazilian documentary filmmaker, she has worked with Disney, Paramount +, HBO, Universal Channel, Al Jazeera, TV Globo, among others. His films have won awards at the São Paulo Film Festival and the Primavera do Cine Festival in Vigo.

Rio de Janeiro, where Susanna's parents met and where she resides, has more than 6 million inhabitants, which is equivalent to one third of Ecuador's total population. The filmmaker is looking for her father in Quito, the country's capital, a city of 2 million inhabitants and located almost 3,000 meters above sea level.

Although Susanna never knew her dad, she grew up listening to the stories her mom told about him. “My mother is a very strong woman, very sweet,” says the filmmaker, who never considered looking for her father until her daughter asked her about her grandfather. “My daughter had a school assignment where she had to draw a family tree. One of the halves of his tree had no information... it was a very ugly tree,” he says. Susanna says everything was fine until that moment when her daughter wanted to know about her grandfather.

The filmmaker acknowledges that she postponed the search and production of the documentary that seeks to portray paternal absence, but says that the time has come to look for her father, to know his origin and find a connection with his Latin American roots.

In her search Lira has few certainties, but the main one led her to travel more than 6,500 kilometers: Susanna is sure that her father is from Quito. “His friends called him Quito, he spoke Spanish and he talked about Ecuador,” says the filmmaker. When Lira's father was in Rio de Janeiro, he said that his name was Elio Francisco de Castro, but apparently it was a false identity, but in Ecuador there are no citizens registered under that name.

Susanna admits that she doesn't know how true the story her father told her mother is, but her mother's stories are the only information she has to continue the search. Lira says that when her mother, who is now 75 years old, told her father about her pregnancy, he told her that he could not have a family and stabilize himself, because he was a revolutionary, “that the police were looking for and that he had traveled to Brazil, to fight with other young Latin Americans.” Susanna's absent father reportedly fled the dictatorship of Velasco Ibarra, who ruled the country for the fifth time, which during his term repressed students, trade unionists and political opponents, even the forces of velasquism had tortured student activists.

In that scenario of persecution and revolution it was impossible, for Susanna's father, to form a home, that's why he left. Lira says that, according to her mother's testimony, her father was a very intelligent and gentle man. Although she doesn't even have a picture of the man, Lira remembers that her mother always highlighted her father's resemblance to Brazilian actor Marcos Winter.

Susanna wants to know her origins and has been emphatic in clarifying that she doesn't want inheritances, money, surnames or any kind of right, she just wants to find her father: “I want to know this person, my origins and move on.”

While Susanna is shooting her documentary and looking for her dad, her mother and daughter are in Rio de Janeiro. “If I find my dad, I bring them to Ecuador,” says Susanna, who has gone to the Ecuadorian Civil Registry and the institutions responsible for migration to find clues.

The decision to find its roots was for Susanna like the eruption of a volcano, like those in the land of her father, the young revolutionary whose trace disappeared since she found out she would have a daughter. Now that daughter is looking for him and documenting his journey trying to portray with landscapes and with her own testimony what absence means.

If you know the man Susanna Lira is looking for or if you know an Ecuadorian who was in Brazil in 1970, please contact the email: nadasobremipadre@gmail.com or mobile phone +593-994-862-021

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