On a Monday night in late September, a small room on the UNB campus will fill with the sound of a river. Tilley Hall, Room 102, is the long-time home of Fredericton's Monday Night Film Series, and on September 28 the series turns to one of the more unusual titles to reach a New Brunswick screen this year: "The Blue Trail," the Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro's near-future dystopia about an old woman who refuses to go quietly.
The film, whose Portuguese title is "O Último Azul," imagines a Brazil where productivity has become the organizing principle of national life. To spare younger generations the burden of caring for their elders, an authoritarian government rounds up citizens past a certain age and relocates them to remote housing colonies. Tereza, a 77-year-old who works in a meat processing plant in northern Brazil, is presented with golden laurels outside her door and a government agent who only wants "to ask a few questions." She sees it for what it is. Before her exile, she slips away and heads into the rivers and tributaries of the Amazon, chasing a wish she has carried her whole life: to fly in an airplane at least once.
The premise sounds bleak, and the film's imagery can be. The vehicle that carries the elderly away is known, in the film's grim slang, as the "wrinkle wagon." But Mascaro has said he was not interested in making a purely political statement. "It's not a movie about a gadget or technology that disrupts the present," he told Inverse. "It's about a cultural change that normalizes elderly people being arrested and taken to a senior colony." The dystopia, in other words, is not the machinery. It is the attitude.
The film's origins are more personal than its premise suggests. Mascaro got the idea from his grandmother, who in her eighties took up painting for the first time and found an entirely new chapter of joy and creativity. Looking for films that might speak to that experience, he found almost nothing. Portrayals of the elderly, he noticed, tended to circle death or nostalgia. The genres that allow a character to be surprised by life -- the coming-of-age story, the road movie -- were reserved for young bodies. "At some point," Mascaro told Far Out Magazine, "I decided to make a playful movie" in which an old woman gets to be the one who runs away.
Mascaro, born in Recife in 1983, came to narrative filmmaking by way of documentaries and visual art, with early works like "High Rise" and "Avenida Brasília Formosa." He broke through internationally with "Neon Bull" and followed it with "Divine Love," both of which established his interest in worlds rarely put on screen and his eye for color and texture. "The Blue Trail" continues that project, and it has been widely described as his most accessible film. It premiered in the main competition of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2025 and walked away with the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize. It went on to a slow, deliberate North American rollout, picked up for U.S. theatrical release by Dekanalog and opening in select theaters in April 2026 -- which is how a film that premiered in Berlin more than a year earlier arrives in Fredericton this fall.
The performance at its center belongs to Denise Weinberg, who was 69 when she made the film, younger than her character. She has said she attributes the casting in part to being one of the few Brazilian actors her age who has not had cosmetic procedures. "I joke with Gabriel: 'did you choose me because I have wrinkles?'" she told the Guardian. The role has made her something of a figure in Brazil, where the film's themes of ageism landed hard. The Guardian reported that older women there have embraced Tereza as a reflection of a certain kind of Brazilian woman -- resistant, hungry for life. One pro-age activist, Natália Dornellas, told the paper she had seen the film five times. An 80-year-old who received a prize at work said it felt as though she was being told "nothing more is expected of you." Weinberg herself has said she does not consider the film purely dystopian, given how Brazil already treats its elders.
That resonance is part of why the Monday Night Film Series exists. The series was started in 1985 by John Pederson, who at the time was producing films through his company Capitol Films from a rented space called the Clark Building, across from Kings Place. It has since become a fixture of Fredericton's cultural calendar, run by the New Brunswick Filmmakers' Co-operative in partnership with the UNB Faculty of Arts and the Film Circuit, a division of the Toronto International Film Festival. The point of the partnership is simple: to bring limited-release, independent, foreign, and Canadian films to a city that would otherwise never see them on a big screen, for one night each.
This term the series will show 15 such films. Admission is $10 at the door, or $7 for members, and memberships can be bought on the night at Tilley 102. There is no reserved seating and no advance ticketing requirement; the series is open to anyone who shows up. For a film that took a Silver Bear in Berlin and then took its time crossing the Atlantic, that is a rare and inexpensive chance to see it projected, in a room full of strangers, on a Monday evening in September.
What they will see is a road movie that runs on water. Tereza's journey down the Amazon is by turns funny, strange, and quietly devastating, populated by characters she meets along the way -- among them a man who introduces her to a snail whose cobalt-blue slime has psychedelic effects, a detail that gives the film its title. The cast includes Rodrigo Santoro alongside Weinberg. The film runs 86 minutes. It is, as the series' own notes put it, a story that fiercely celebrates individual freedom and identity against an unfeeling, hyper-productive society -- and a reminder, as Mascaro has said from the beginning, that it is never too late to take flight.