On November 3, 2026, just outside Auditorium 3 at The Culver Theater, director Marta Torres stood in front of a camera, talking about her film, Sweet Suite California.
Dressed in an off-white shawl and a signature coat of red lipstick following the premiere at the 19th Los Angeles Brazilian Film Festival, she delivered her remarks directly to the lens for social media feeds.
The scene set up a sharp irony. A severe repetitive strain injury which left her hands crippled with pain and numbness keeps Torres off digital screens entirely, forcing her to abandon keyboards and her former legal career in Brazil. Yet here she was, recording a social media post to reach an audience consumed by the very devices she critiques in her work.
“Why am I not on my phone very much? Because I have a health problem,” Torres explained. “People who are with me in the real world also feel lonely and want to talk, and the conversation flows. This is a theme I always bring into my films, because it gives me so much anguish to see people on their phones all the time.”
Her physical inability to type led to her defining creative constraint, “I didn’t type the script,” Torres said.
Instead of a keyboard, Torres relied entirely on vocal direction and physical theater traditions to guide her international cast.
That no-script method makes for a striking local contrast in Culver City, the birthplace of Hollywood’s studio system, where mogul Thomas H. Ince decreed in 1913 that no camera could shoot without a pre-typed ‘continuity script’.
Her film follows Courtney, a quirky digital influencer chasing the American dream in Hollywood who lives her life online and is eventually sexually assaulted at a party. To navigate the subject of digital vulnerability, Torres drew on her background as a former police chief, public defender, and human rights professor in Alagoas, Brazil.
More than a century after Ince built studio machinery on the typed page, a scriptless Brazilian director proves that storytelling can still be driven purely by voice.
The 19th Los Angeles Brazilian Film Festival concludes its run at The Culver Theater on Nov. 5, 2026, when festival winners will be announced during the closing ceremony.
Clara Carvalho
