Market Intelligence: Actress Bruna Aiiso reports loss of publicity after showing that her mother is black

Actress Bruna Aiiso, 35, exposed on her social media a report after a cosmetics brand gave up on a Mother’s Day advertising campaign after sending a photo of her mother, who is black. She prefers not to reveal the brand, for fear of getting in the way of her professional future with legal issues.

Bruna, who starred in Globo’s soap opera “Bom Sucesso” (2019), is the daughter of Lia Maria, 63, and Tino Aiiso, 62, of Japanese descent.

They met while still in their teens, got married, but broke up about 20 years ago. Her mother has a degree in physical education, an actress and a masseuse, and her father is currently a street vendor, both residents of Campo Limpo, a peripheral neighborhood in the south of São Paulo.

The actress says that the same brand had already made contact through an agency for a budget for an advertising action. “The budget wasn’t approved and that’s okay,” she recalls. Contact was resumed, again through an agency, and they asked for photos of Bruna with her mother, as there were no images of the two on Instagram.

“Then we sent it and they replied like this: ‘Oh, we thought she was Asian. So unfortunately it won’t happen'”, says Bruna. “And then she even wrote it like this: ‘Sorry for the ball out’. That’s the term she used.”

“It’s very common for actors to take ‘no’. But racialized actors, black, yellow, hear a lot more ‘no’ than ‘yes,'” says Bruna, who also says she kept mulling over this story until recording and publishing the video.

On the internet, after the post with the outburst, many people looked for the actress and associated what happened with racism. “And I got a lot of comments saying ‘this is prejudice, this is racism’… I knew there was something wrong with this story and I wasn’t traveling.”

Bruna recalls situations in which she identifies racism, which has already happened in her life and which were shared by people on the internet.

“People saying that they’ve lived through very similar situations to what I lived with when I was little, for example. My mother taking me to school and thinking she was my nanny, that she wasn’t my mother”, he says. “Jokes: ‘Oh, where did this kid steal?’ You know something like that? It’s always been that.”

Performing arts and projects

In addition to the Globo soap opera, the actress was in the cast of the Amazon Prime series “A Todo Vapor”, in which she plays Nioko Takeda, and the web series “M0THERBOX”, in which Robô Teste lives, in addition to the play “A Hora Da Estrela”, based on the work of Clarice Lispector

Bruna also had a project approved by Pro-mac (Municipal Support Program for Cultural Projects). The feature-length documentary is called “A Verdadeira História do Bairro da Liberdade” and wants to tell the trajectory of the region in the capital of São Paulo through the eyes of a yellow person and a black person.

The film is now in the funding stage and needs to reach R$520,000 to be made viable. For this, companies or even individuals can allocate two installments of the IPTU (Imposto Predial e Territorial Urbano) to the initiative through the City Hall.

Another project by Bruna is “A Fera de Os – A Life Dedicated to Boxing”, a documentary focused on the life of world champion Miguel de Oliveira, a boxer who died of pancreatic cancer in October 2021, aged 74. The actress was a student of the former athlete for 12 years.

“We were very good friends. He spent his birthdays with me. Brazilians don’t appreciate athletes and champions outside of football”, says the artist.