What began as an academic journey to China has turned into a film-making career that bridges two cultures. Brazilian Milena de Moura Barba has built her career on connecting Brazil and China through cinema. 

She left Brazil in 2016 to study at the renowned Beijing Film Academy and completed her master's degree there. Since then, she has become one of the leading references on Chinese culture in Brazilian audiovisual production.

Her first documentary, Songs of Beijing (2018), produced during her master's studies, portrayed echoes of everyday life in China through images and music. The film received rave reviews and was selected for E Tudo Verdade (It's All True), one of Latin America's three Oscar-qualifying festivals for feature-length and short documentaries. 

The recognition marked her entry into the international circuit and reinforced her role as a cultural bridge between the two countries.

After the success of her debut, Moura Barba founded Miluspanda, a production company dedicated to creating original works and offering consultancy for filmmakers interested in China-related projects. 

Miluspanda has a special interest in transmedia projects and international cultural productions. 

"From everything I learned in China, we decided to focus on connecting people from different cultures through the empathic power of cinema," said Moura Barba, who acts as the director of Miluspanda. 

Her expertise soon attracted attention from some of Brazil's most recognized directors. In 2022, Moura Barba joined the team for Sleeping with Open Eyes (2024), a multinational movie with a Chinese cast directed by Nele Wohlatz from Germany, and produced by award-winning Kleber Mendonca Filho from Brazil. 

In recent months and for next year, Moura Barba is focused on a big new project. 

"We have secured funding for a film about Brazilian neuroscientist Miguel Angelo Nicolelis, who received the Chinese Government Friendship Award." 

This award, given to Nicolelis on Jan 25 in Beijing this year, with the attendance of Premier Li Qiang and Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi, recognizes contributions to China's modernization, economic reform and international cooperation.

Nicolelis is internationally recognized for his research on brain-machine interfaces, work aimed at helping patients with severe physical disabilities regain mobility, and now is an active part of the production of the new movie.

For Moura Barba, the new initiative represents both a continuation of her bridge-building between the two countries and an expansion into scientific themes with global impact. From Songs of Beijing to international cooperation, her trajectory shows how one filmmaker has used cinema to connect Brazil and China in new and meaningful ways.

A movie about human brain limits

The new project, provisionally called The Creator of Everything, is actively being shot by a team of experienced filmmakers with Moura Barba as the executive producer. 

The new film thrills Moura Barba because she views it as a new frontier in her development as an artist. 

"It will be incredible for us to take part in this. I believe that bringing cinema together with pioneering and successful initiatives of collaboration in the limits of knowledge, applying science in other areas of our society, is essential.

"This was a project I chose very carefully and with great affection to collaborate on. I see enormous potential for it to engage and connect audiences in our countries, around a subject that is both relevant and urgent."

The documentary, co-written and directed by documentarians Rodrigo Teixeira Marques and Tiago Tambelli, tells the story and philosophy of brain-machine capacities as well as Nicolelis' achievements.   

"It is an essayistic film, with the voice-over of Nicolelis, questioning, at a higher level, the human being's capacity to think, realize and create," said Tambelli.

Marques emphasized that the protagonist has more than science essays to share, but a whole understanding on society. 

"It is about the power of the human brain as a creator, as it works to build a society that understands that limits and solution are given by human efforts, not supernatural causes." 

Nicolelis told China Daily the idea came to him 10 years ago. 

"We have been developing this research since when we planned to help a debilitated boy make the first kick at the soccer World Cup of 2014. Rodrigo Marques followed me since then, when we established laboratories in Brazil and other countries."

The film will also document how his partnership with China at the Xuanwu Hospital of Beijing can help his team's achievements leap ahead. 

"We began transferring patients to Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University of Beijing, and we are writing our research to be published in the coming months."  

"It is a fruitful cooperation, with great results, that permitted interactions between Chinese and Brazilian scientists," he continued. "A large number of patients, the possibility to make sophisticated studies on cerebral image, recovery process, many things we could not do in Brazil, with last generation magnetic resonance machines that we didn't have in Brazil. We will have a high impact in the clinic rehabilitation of paraplegic patients."

Moura Barba shares Nicolelis' confidence and decided to document the process. "This project brings together many strengths to connect the two countries and to ensure that we can, in fact, carry out a successful co-production. It addresses the issue of pure science, cutting-edge science, and the question of scientific knowledge that will directly benefit the population."

Written language leads the film script

But, as every story begins somewhere, the filmmaker said the harvest of today started with an admiration for the Chinese idiom and its reflection on culture. From this starting point, her debut movie Songs of Beijing creates a circular thread between cinematography, music, speech, language and image. 

The movie consists of a series of interviews with ordinary people who, in the context of the documentary, sit in a simple chair carved with Chinese symbols. They are invited to talk and, at some point, share a song from their lives. As it happens, they reveal fragments of their stories and what makes each song so intimate to them.

For Moura Barba, diversity was central to her project. The film, she explained, is grounded in her encounters with several of China's 56 recognized ethnic groups, experiences she sought out before and during her master's studies.

"I sought diversity," she said. "One of the main goals was to look for it in the film, which offers just a small sample of Chinese cultural plurality. Because when we think about China and the countries of Eastern Asia, many — especially people who don't know China — often have the illusion of uniformity."

The first voice to appear belongs to Weng Yilan, who opens the film by singing a Brazilian folk song in Portuguese. The lyrics read: "If this street, if this street were mine, I would order it to be paved with little stones, with little diamond stones, for my love, for my love to pass." 

It is the only Brazilian song in the movie, serving as the author's subtle signature. In the background, Moura Barba's own voice gives the command to start recording, just as the title appears on the screen.

From then on, a range of Chinese voices share their experiences and emotions through music. Each testimony, whether spoken or sung, is linked in some way to images of daily life and memory.

One of the most striking figures is Li Youhua, an elderly woman born during the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45). 

As a child, she was forced to move from village to village while her father fought in the war. He returned from the conflict five years later, bringing with him a song that marked her early years. It told the story of Erxiao, a 13-year-old boy who fought and died as a soldier, defending the village she had fled with her mother.

"Erxiao, cunningly, was at the front, guiding the enemy straight into our ambush," she recalled in song. "From four corners fire came. The enemy turned their weapons on Erxiao, who fell on a great rock. Poor Erxiao, only 13 years old, tragically killed."

This theme of resistance, present in other testimonies, contrasts with lighter voices such as Xiao Ai, a young girl who sings brightly about the beauty of the Hulunbuir Plain