‘The Nature of Invisible Things’ Director Rafaela Camelo Lines Up Luciana Paes and Sundance-Winner Camila Márdila For ‘The Favorite Daughter’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Luciana Paes (“Friendly Beast”) and Camila Márdila (“I’m Still Here”) have been cast in “The Favorite Daughter” (“A Filha Favorita”), the new film by rising Brazilian director Rafaela Camelo. The filmmaker is gearing up to shoot the follow-up to “The Nature of Invisible Things,” which premiered to acclaim at the Berlin Film Festival in 2025 and is one of the six pre-selected films vying for a chance to represent Brazil at the Oscars. In 2023, Variety named Camelo one of Brazil’s top talents to track.

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“The Favorite Daughter” will star Paes and Márdila as Amélia and Luiza, two sisters reflecting on their past and their relationship. When Luiza returns home after years living in Germany, she believes the trip will be a brief family visit, but things take a turn when she and her sister Amélia find out their father has a third daughter.

From there onwards, the family drama turns into a road movie through the backlands of Ceará as the two women are forced to confront their own history and rebuild the bond between them. 

“The Favorite Daughter” is co-written by Camelo and André Araújo (“Gugu’s World”). The project is a co-production between Brazil’s rising Deberton Filmes via Allan Deberton and Marcelo Pinheiro – whose “Gugu’s World” premiered in Berlin earlier this year and is also gunning for the chance to represent Brazil at the Oscars– and Germany, with Maritza Grass and Vincent Edusei producing for Carousel Film. 

Paes is a renowned actress who has appeared in major Brazilian works of TV and film, including Juliana Rojas’s “Necropolis Symphony” and Anna Muylaert’s “Don’t Call Me Son.” Márdila won the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Acting at Sundance for her breakout performance in Muylaert’s “The Second Mother,” and went on to feature in other standout films, including Carolina Markowicz’s “Charcoal” and Walter Salles’s Oscar-winning “I’m Still Here.” She has recently wrapped production on Markowicz’s “The Funeral,” one of Brazil’s standout titles for 2027. 

“When Luciana and Camila’s names came up together, it immediately felt right,” Camelo tells Variety. “They share a certain tone as actresses: there’s humor and warmth, but also there’s something slightly unpredictable. That was exactly what I was looking for.”

“‘The Favorite Daughter’ is, for me, a movie about letting go of the need to be the chosen daughter so you can finally discover who you really are when no one else is assigning seats at the table anymore,” she adds of the film. “I’m interested in how conflicts can hide in plain sight within a family, beneath trivial conversations, jokes, memories, and small awkward moments. Humor becomes a way of both relieving and postponing tension. The most important conversations often happen when we least expect them.”

Paes tells Variety she is “very happy and excited” about the opportunity to work with Camelo and share the screen with Márdila. “It is so precious to be able to look at the relationship between these two sisters with such care and rawness.” 

“It is in our family that we allow ourselves to confront the wounds that we hide from the world,” adds the actress. “This is where we live nakedly with our imperfections. [Camelo] treads in deep waters with the fluidity of someone who has fully embraced their humanity—and loves it. I am 100% committed to the project. I always wanted to play Camila’s older sister; she’s so talented. The time has come.” 

Márdila notes how thrilled she is to be collaborating with Camelo again after also being featured in “The Nature of Invisible Things,” and even more so given how “moved” she feels by the story. “The relationship between these two sisters goes beyond the individual, revealing both loving and thorny sides to the relationships we nurture with our origins. I always felt like I should have been Luciana’s sister; I see myself in her an awful lot, on top of her being an actress I greatly admire.”