After arriving late several times at work, a librarian is dismissed from his school. The HR employee tasked with presenting the bad news offers him a lift, their conversation deepens and by the end of the night they discover they have a lot in common – including a shared history of mental health treatment – and end up falling in love.

In The Day I Met You, the scenarios, the characters’ professions and the actors playing the protagonists – Renato Novaes and Grace Passô – challenge the conventions of Brazilian romantic films: two Black actors in their 40s defying the genre’s usual slender body standards.

Directed by André Novais Oliveira, the film – which last week won the 2025 APCA award for best direction and earned Passô the best actress award at the 2023 Rio de Janeiro International film festival – is the latest example of how an independent film production company is reshaping the country’s audiovisual landscape by highlighting the experiences of the “ordinary” Brazilian.

“Brazilian cinema doesn’t always think about that guy who works as a librarian at a school, who might be going through depression and could also fall in love,” said the film-maker Gabriel Martins, 37, who along with Oliveira and two other friends founded Filmes de Plástico (Plastic Films) in 2009.

Since then, the company’s 26 films – seven features and 19 shorts – have focused on telling stories of working-class, mainly Black characters, living in impoverished urban areas. “This is the segment that quantitatively represents the majority of Brazil’s population, yet, ironically, it is underrepresented in our cinema overall,” said Martins.

In 2022, another of their productions, directed by Martins, became the first film by a Black director to be selected by the Brazilian academy to represent the country in the race for best international feature at the Oscars. Although Mars One did not make the shortlist, it filled cinema halls nationwide and was acquired by the US film-maker Ava DuVernay to be streamed on Netflix.

It tells the story of a Black family living on the outskirts of a big city: a father who works as a doorman, a mother who is a cleaner, an older daughter who decides to move out and live with her girlfriend, and a young boy who, despite his father’s wish that he become a footballer, dreams instead of studying astrophysics and colonising Mars.

“Our inspirations come from our families, our neighbours … from the countless one- or two-hour bus rides we took on our way to university or work. We spent so much time observing these lives and living it that it was impossible not to let these stories emerge in our films,” said the director.

The production company was born from the meeting of Gabriel and Maurílio Martins, 44, at film school. In addition to sharing a love for cinema and the same last name – though they are not relatives – they discovered they lived just a 10-minute walk from each other, on the outskirts of Contagem, a city in the metropolitan region of Minas Gerais’s capital.

“People who live on the outskirts of many places, not just in Brazil, identify with our films,” said Maurílio, also a director and screenwriter, who has spent recent years attending film festivals worldwide to showcase Filmes de Plástico’s work. “There are some ‘universal’ aspects to the peripheries elsewhere, such as the distance from city centres, the lack of decent public transport, the self-built architectural style … I think misery kind of levels us all, doesn’t it?” he added.

The idea of founding a production company came not only from the instant connection between the Martinses, Oliveira (the three take turns as directors and screenwriters, occasionally stepping in as actors) and the producer Thiago Macêdo Correia, but also from the realisation that, as young film-makers from a state outside Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo’s bustling audiovisual market, they were unlikely to have the opportunity to pursue their creative ambitions.

In 2024, they filmed their most ambitious project yet: a drama for Netflix. “In the first feature we made, back in 2014, the crew had six people; now, there was one day on set with 200 people,” said Gabriel Martins, who wrote and directed the still to be released film.

The story will once again feature the distinctive accent of Minas Gerais state. In Brazil, audiovisual productions and news programmes have long pushed the notion of a “neutral” accent, which is actually the accent of the wealthier states of Rio and São Paulo.

“I’ve heard people from other states say they couldn’t understand what was being said in our movies,” said Maurílio Martins. “When someone says the ‘audio isn’t good’, I reply: ‘No, it’s your ears that aren’t used to this accent, this setting and this way of life.’ The unfamiliar can be unsettling, but it’s our job to keep pushing forward,” he added.