Karim Aïnouz has been coming to Cannes for 20 years, with all kinds of movies. His little-seen 2002 debut, Madame Satã, earned him a GLAAD nomination, introducing him as a provocative new voice in queer cinema. His 2019 masterwork Invisible Life, a ’50s melodrama following two sisters in Rio de Janeiro, won him the prestigious Un Certain Regard prize. Just last year, he debuted the starry Firebrand, a portrait of Katherine Parr (Alicia Vikander) and her dangerous marriage to the tyrant King Henry VIII (Jude Law). In fact, Aïnouz has been in the main competition on the Croisette for the last two years in a row.

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This year’s entry feels like both a homecoming and a bold step forward for the filmmaker. Motel Destino, premiering Wednesday, works in the traditions of noir and ’70s Brazilian cinema, set and shot where Aïnouz grew up on the country’s blindingly bright Northeastern coast. A drifter named Heraldo (newcomer Iago Xavier) winds up at a roadside sex motel, where he falls into a passionate affair with the woman running it (Nataly Rocha) while fending off her volatile husband (Fábio Assunção). Lensed in 16 mm on an explosive color palette, and paced to the sweaty rhythms of a forbidden tropical romance, it’s an erotic noir as only Aïnouz could fashion it: one with a subtly, sensually queer sensibility, politically charged and narratively uncompromising.

As he tells it to Vanity Fair, this marks the beginning of a new chapter—both for him and, he hopes, the global positioning of Brazilian cinema.

Vanity Fair: I think Motel Destino is the sexiest movie here.

Karim Aïnouz: That is good to know, because we need that.

Well, let’s use that as a starting point. Your last film was the historical drama Firebrand, with Jude Law and Alicia Vikander. Why an erotic thriller next?

I live in Brazil, and I haven’t shot in Brazil in the last five years or something like that. I really wanted to shoot there again. I had just done that movie in the middle of England—in the middle of the spring, but it was quite cloudy—and I really wanted to choose something that celebrated life in a way which is very explosive. Because what happened in Brazil in the last four years was the pandemic, a monster in power. And I wanted to also do something at home—meaning at the place I was born. The beach where the film takes place is where I spent my childhood. It’s very bright. I thought sensuality was a great way to celebrate life, and I miss sensuality in cinema. I think sex is a celebration of life.

I’m really interested in how much you can tell with the body in cinema. I wanted to do something that is about a more complicated sense of identity in terms of sensuality, like who is in love with whom and what sexual orientation they have. I was super inspired by these movies that were made in Brazil in the 1970s. When the military came to power, censorship started. So anything that was political was forbidden. There was this whole tradition of films, which were sort of porn comedies, that then started out and were very popular. It’s almost like giallo in Italy. It was sex—a very effective and very lucrative moment in Brazilian cinema, where you could talk about certain things that were politically very delicate through genre.

The color palette of this film is so loud and bold. How did you devise it along the lines of creating a political genre piece?

I feel like the Global South has been producing a lot of drama. It’s almost like what we know how to do is drama, or musicals in the case of Bollywood or Nollywood, and I was interested in thinking of film genres as not an American property. It is something that we can all play with. Noir comes from German expressionist cinema and the question of the shadows and of the light. I thought, “I would love to use that element of film noir, created not through shadows but through color.” For colors to work like shadow, they needed to be a bit overwhelming. They can’t just be just color. It needs to be over-the-top color.

It’s very interesting to see you going from Firebrand to this—very different styles. Is that political for you, to showcase that range within Brazilian and your own cinema?

Completely. Genre comes to me as a tool to talk about something and a way to actually make—I know this is going to sound a bit funny, but—proper cinema. Every film for me should be something for which I am getting out of my comfort zone. I had done a melodrama with Invisible Life, which was very consciously constructed as such. Then, for me, Firebrand was a historical thriller. In this case, I wanted to play with the idea of noir. I was very inspired by what the Scandis did with Nordic Noir—there was a way that they picked up noir and made it their own. The question of violence is so present in Brazilian culture, it’s such a brutal country—it seems very cordial and bright, but it is very brutal—so I think genre is also a way to bring people to new things that they somehow are familiar with.

You’ve been working pretty quickly, with two Cannes competition slots in a row.

My first film was here 20 years ago. Then I went through a period of my life, as everybody does at some point, of losing your parents. When one of your parents is gone, you feel you’re going to be next, so there’s a sense of urgency, which is not bad. It’s true that I’ve been working a lot, and I just love what I do. It’s also a really exciting time in cinema. People might complain, but I think there’s so many different possibilities.

It’s a good year for big swings too. You’re coming into a year where people are playing with genre in a really interesting way.

Just that we’re allowed to be here is great. There was a moment where genre was not very respected at Cannes. This is really exciting. Did you see The Substance?

I did, yes. And you’ve got a Jacques Audiard musical.

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Bold, bold, bold. That’s the thing. We need bold. What are the elements that we can do to keep this art alive? How can you make sure that somebody wants to leave their home to go to see something in the movie theater? That’s also something we need to take into account. It was very funny because when I was making my movie, I was thinking, “Oh, this is all too OTT.” But yeah. I am OTT, and I think the movie should be. I’m like, “What do I have to lose?” There’s this idea that Latin Americans should produce drama because people are obsessed with reality. I was very free during this movie, and I think that’s why there’s so much sex and so much color. I didn’t know what it was going to be.

You mentioned feeling very free making this. With something like Firebrand, you’re working with bigger stars and a larger budget—more people to answer to, I’d imagine. What are some of the fundamental ways that losing all that changes you as a director?

This was the challenge of Firebrand. I remember going into rooms with those actors, and we had the best costume designer I could have imagined in my life. He was a historian. I would say, “Take the hats off.” Then he would say, “No, no. At the time, people didn’t take their hats off even if they were in the castle.” I was like, “When they’re going to the toilet, they’re going to take their hats off.” [Laughs] No matter how much I changed history, it was a historical film, and it’s a historical film about an empire. All of that comes with a price. It’s not my history…. The actors in Firebrand were extraordinary. Not only Jude and Alicia, but all the supporting cast were incredible. Simon Russell Beale, Eddie Marsan, all those guys, they were just a dream. Here, my main actor [Iago Xavier] had never been on a plane. He’d never been on a movie set.

How did you find Iago?

I did 600, 800 auditions. I began the auditions with a three-minute silence, like those Andy Warhol portraits—just like three minutes. Not on Super 8 obviously, but on film. I wanted to make sure that this film was very local, so I wanted to make sure that all my actors came from that region, from that province. The way they speak, it’s very specific. It’s very different from the people speaking in the south of the country. From that I saw who caught my eye for more than two minutes, then there’s charisma. So that’s how he came about. We did loads of improvs together.

He comes from a very poor background, but very smart and very open. I was looking for someone who could be violent and yet very vulnerable, and I think that he does that. I’m going to say something a bit radical, but I think we should be forbidden from making movies with white people in Brazil because I think there’s some historical reparation to be done. It’s a country that’s branded itself as this white country, and actually it’s a Black country. I was really interested in having a landscape of people that really translate the diversity of Brazil. The white guy plays the white guy, so that was also important, obviously. But when I was growing up, there were a lot of boys and women like [Iago] and I never saw them on screen. Never.

This interview has been edited and condensed.