Tribeca Interview: “Funk” Director Aly Muritiba

With Funk, Brazilian director Aly Muritiba (Private Desert) crafts a love letter to “putaria,” the kinky funk music of the favelas surrounding Rio de Janeiro. That genre is unabashedly sexual in its lyrics and themes, often in very explicit fashion. With gleeful abandon, its practitioners—at least as we see them here—rap and sing about all kinds of pleasurable acts, moving their bodies to the rhythm in ways that leave no doubt as to what they’re miming.

In the movie, we meet Sabrina (Duda Santos), a young woman with aspirations to make it big as a putaria star, in contrast to her mother (MC Nem, in real life a big putaria star), who once had a shot and blew it. As Sabrina overcomes the challenges on her journey, Funk also becomes a sharp examination of race, class, and privilege, showing how easily an upstart from a poor milieu can be pushed down by the inhabitants of the upper classes. At the 2026 Tribeca Festival (where I saw and reviewed the film), I had a chance to speak with Muritiba, and here is that conversation, edited for length and clarity. Muritiba mostly spoke in English (sometimes turning to an interpreter for help with a word or two), and what follows is his own voice, albeit occasionally adjusted to fit American idioms.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed: For those who don’t know, what is Brazilian putaria, or funky music? Describe it to me, please.

Aly Muritiba: Well, Brazilian funk is a musical genre, and also a movement, that was created by Black people in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, mixing a bit of Miami bass with the beats and drums of Candomblé, which is an African religion and really important in Brazil. And this rhythm and genre were created by the Black and the poor to express freedom and sexuality and desire. And for some years in Brazil, it was almost a crime to make funk balls and parties because the police would appear and arrest people. But after some artists started to perform funk in the mainstream, such as Anitta, funk started to become important outside of Brazil. It’s incredible because it’s full of life, full of energy. The first time that I went to a funky ball, it was like my brain blew and I decided to make a movie about it because it’s incredible.

CLR: Did the police arrest people because of the sexual content or for another reason?

AM: No, in Brazil sex is not illegal at all. But the thing is this genre of music was created by Black people and, as you know, Brazil has a slavery past. And the prejudice towards   Black cultural creativity is so strong in our society that this is what happened. The police maybe didn’t accept this expression by people of color.

CLR: So, who lives in Rio’s favelas?

AM: Rio de Janeiro is a huge city in Brazil, but it’s a city with a lot of mountains and the poor were sent to live in the mountains, and there in the mountains is where the favelas were built and it’s a place where you don’t have good utilities like water or electricity or trash pickup. So it’s a poor place, but the people who live there create a lot of incredible things. And the favela is also the place where a lot of the drug dealers live, as well, and where we have a lot of violence. So it’s a complex place where people created a complex cultural manifestation such as funk. We have a lot of movies in Brazil that take place in favelas. 

CLR: In fact, you mentioned last night at the post-premiere Q&A that there’s an actual genre of films called “favela films.” Please tell me about those. 

AM: Yes, the favela movies. The first big favela movie that was made in Brazil was City of God.

CLR: Which I’ve seen. 

AM: Yeah. It’s an incredible movie that opened the eyes of the world to our cinema. After City of God, there followed a lot of movies set in the favelas about violence and crime. I decided to make a movie without this scenario, without these things. I decided to make a move, not about death but about life, not about violence but about dance and sex because we don’t have a lot of favela movies where the people of color enjoy their lives and I wanted Funk to be that kind of movie.

CLR: And you said last night at the Q&A that you wanted to make sure that nobody—specifically people who were Black—died or committed violence.

AM: Yeah. It was one of my big concerns because we have a lot of movies where the Black people are represented as criminals or drug dealers and I decided that in my movie, nobody would die. We don’t have shotguns … no … we do have shotguns, but we don’t have any shooting in the movie because my intent was to make a fun movie about joy, about life.

CLR: And it certainly is that. So you also mentioned last night that you have a background in documentary and you said that this informed the film. Please tell me how.

AM: Yes, that’s how I started my career. An interesting thing that maybe you don’t know is that I used to be a prison guard. Before my career in the cinema, I worked as a prison guard and during this time I started to study cinema. So, my first three films were documentaries about the prison system in Brazil. I started making documentaries about poor people, about Black people who were in jail. And when I, 15 years later, decided to make Funk, I thought that it would be nice to make a movie with the same attitude that I had when making documentaries. So I went to the favelas for a couple of months. I met the people from the funk movement. I invited them to read my script to play some scenes with me and I rewrote the script. When we were shooting, I invited the producer and dancers and people from the favela to play in the movie and we didn’t have scripted lines. We used a lot of improvisation and that is how we shot the film.

CLR: So tell me about the casting process because you did involve so many people from the favela. A lot of them are from the putaria world, but not Duda Santos, right?

AM: Duda is also from the favela, and when she came to work with me, she was already a star in Brazilian soap operas. This movie is her first feature film, but she is an actress with a big career in Brazilian TV. She was the only professional actress in the movie. The other people were from the funk movement. We had a big casting process and we set up a kind of workshop where they learned a little bit about how to relate to the camera and to the boom, and after one month I chose some of them to play in the movie. So the dancers, the DJs, and the mother are people from funk. MC Nem, who played the mother of Sabrina, she was one of the most important singers in the beginning of the 2000s. She was really important in the funk movement in Brazil. She’s a kind of queen of the putaria from Rio. For real.

CLR: Please tell me about her. She wrote the music for your film, correct?

AM: Yeah.

CLR: Please tell me about that collaboration. 

AM: Yeah. MC Nem is amazing. She’s totally crazy. She looks like the character that she plays in the movie. She’s a huge composer and musician in the funk movement and she continues to live in the favela. And when we started to prepare the movie, I asked her: “Would you like to write the music for our movie? Because I need the final song, the one that the mom and the daughter sing together and it would be nice if you wrote the music for me.” And she told me, “Do you want that kinky music really hard or soft?” And I said, “I don’t know, I want kinky music like the kind you do.” And she wrote this incredible song for the movie about how women can use their bodies to express freedom and desire and it’s perfect for the ending of the movie.

CLR: Well, thank you very much, Aly. It was great talking to you.

AM: Thank you.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Chris Reed is the editor of Film Festival Today. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.