Together with his three siblings, including Walter Salles, director of acclaimed films such as Central do Brasil ( Central Station, 1998) and Diarios de motocicleta ( The Motorcycle Diaries, 2004), João Moreira Salles inherited the fortune of his late father, Walther Moreira Salles, who founded Unibanco, which is today Itaú-Unibanco, Brazil’s largest private-sector bank, and served as ambassador to the United States in the 1950s.
As founder of the cultural magazine piauí (2006 – ) and president of the Instituto Moreira Salles, one of Brazil’s most important cultural institutions, João Moreira Salles is one of the most important progressive figures in Brazilian cultural life. This background surely augmented his ability to get close to an important cultural figure such as the internationally acclaimed classical pianist Nelson Freire, who became the eponymous subject of Salles’ essay-documentary film from 2003, or Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the famous Brazilian labour leader who would become Brazil’s thirty-fifth president and who granted Salles and his small crew considerable access at the tail-end of his fourth and finally successful presidential campaign in 2002. Yet this same background also causes a considerable problem for Salles: namely, to figure out how to negotiate the challenge of trying to heed the “primacy of the object,” as Theodor W. #Leonardo salles videos gay xxx how to#.