Actress-turned-filmmaker Nathalia Acevedo made her feature directorial debut with Salón de belleza, a very, loose adaptation of Mario Bellatin’s 1994 novella that transforms a beauty salon into a refuge for people dying from an unnamed illness. Rather than directly transpose Bellatin’s novel, Acevedo developed the screenplay through an ongoing dialogue with the author, incorporating passages from his other works and reflections that took place during the pandemic. The result is a meditation on illness, exclusion and the need to forge alternative forms of community in a hostile world — and plus its submerges the viewer freeing them of conventional narrative form.
Selected in competition for the Giornate degli Autori section at the 2026 Venice Film Festival, I had the opportunity to speak to Nathalia about the visual blueprint she employs (some excellent work by cinematographer Balthazar Lab), the DNA of Sam Louwyck’s character and how the “disease” is never given an identity. Here is my sit-down:
