Changing of the Gods
Comes to Brazil
We were thrilled when the newly launching Brazilian platform called Aquarius reached out to us about acquiring Changing of the Gods for national distribution as its “lead series.” It’s the first Brazilian and Latin American platform for content on spirituality, well-being and health, science and technology, arts, environment, knowledge and society.
Says Aquarius’ Director of Acquisitions Luiz Felipe Reis, “I think Changing of the Gods has enormous potential to reach different peoples because we have a kind of similar history of colonial exploitation and a huge Black community and a huge Indigenous community, and the whole feminist movement, the social rights and environment rights. And so we are dealing with the same issues here in Brazil. It’s different, but it’s similar. This is why we think that there’s a very huge potential for Changing of the Gods to connect with the people here.”
Aquarius was recently founded by Bruno Wainer, who previously founded Downtown Filmes, Brazil’s biggest movie distributor. Bruno began his career as a distributor in 1991 with the acclaimed Lumiere Films, which distributed A-list films such as Life is Beautiful, The English Patient, and City of God. He went on to found Downtown Filmes in 2006, which has since distributed and co-produced 177 films.
Then life took a turn for Bruno. As his son Gabriel Wainer, the Aquarius CEO, describes, “My father is a very successful cinema distributor in Brazil, a very hard-working man. But when the pandemic came along, it came along with cancer, which made him change his perspective. It was one of these times in a person’s life that a disease came and brought many difficulties and obstacles, but in the same way, this deep existential crisis made him seek help from psychoanalysis and meditation. He also started to watch movies that helped him live, which is the goal of our platform, movies that help us live. So we started the Aquarius project. He wanted to make a streaming platform to make all this content available and to give back to the people what he got when he was in this crisis.”
Gabriel saw Changing of the Gods as “a perfect fit. The documentary touches on all the important things for Aquarius from our perspective: deeply in touch with nature and the cosmos, and shifting astrology from a personalistic to a social perspective. From Brazil’s perspective, things are starting to change. When I can understand the planetary configurations and the social changes and this zeitgeist moving from time to time, this is a very useful tool, and it’s a very beautiful way to look at our existence. I think because Brazilians in general are very spiritual, and they are astrology fans, this film should make the audience’s mind expand. Our late president is going home now. That’s a great thing for us. So we’ll open up a very good future in front of us.”
Adds Luiz Felipe Reis: “When I read about Changing of the Gods, when I saw the trailer on YouTube, I called up Gabriel and I said to him and to Bruno, ‘Whoa, we find here a serious work that encompasses and connects all these dots.’ The series is an investigation into the connections and urgencies of this cosmic terrestrial system in which we live, and about the inseparability and the intertwining of all things. Changing of the Gods, and also Bioneers, opened up perspectives for us, and this is why we feel that our platform is a lot inspired by the work you are doing now.”
We will let you know when Changing of the Gods goes live in Brazil later in 2023. We’re also excited that Aquarius will feature a powerful slate of Bioneers videos.
