Daughter of Northeasterners and raised in São Paulo since the age of three, Aline Midlej grew up watching Rio de Janeiro from a distance. The first memory she has of the city is a photograph. She was six years old and was at Cristo Redentor with her maternal grandmother. The classic tourist photo at Brazil's greatest postcard landmark opens a relationship that would take decades to deepen, but was already, in some way, foretold for this Rio native born in São Luís do Maranhão, who today sees the same Corcovado through her window at home.
The turning point came when Aline was 23 years old and working as a producer at Record. She traveled to Rio to shoot a piece about social inequality in Morro do Vidigal, the neighborhood next to Leblon that had reached her through Manoel Carlos's soap operas during her teenage years. It was there that she realized she was facing a singular city, where beauty and violence coexisted side by side, without one canceling out the other.
From that experience onwards, inequality in Rio became one of the central themes of her path. Some years later, when writing the book "De Marte à favela" about the fight against poverty, in partnership with Edu Lyra, Aline would dedicate a chapter to Morro da Providência, deepening her connection with a city that "insists on being happy despite every contradiction."
Working at TV Globo and GloboNews was what brought Aline to Rio for good during the Covid-19 pandemic, therefore, into the emptiness. But, over time, the city revealed itself to her as she formed bonds, made friends, and consolidated her journalistic style, her public place, and her professional identity. The pregnancy of her daughter Celeste, born in Rio, added new layers to the experience. Walking to the Jardim Botânico, shopping on foot, sitting on the grass by the Lagoa with Celeste, drinking coconut water, cycling with no particular destination are gestures that build, day by day, something she recognizes as part of her most intimate formation. In Rio, the bicycle is transportation; in São Paulo, the bicycle used to arrive in the car's trunk.
But the agenda is still incomplete. She wants to get to know Madureira, the Feira de São Cristóvão, Tijuca, the Rocinha from within. She wants to go back to Downtown, to Rua da Constituição, to the markets that shout and overflow. Above all, she wants to experience Pequena África and the Valongo area. To understand the city's Afro-Brazilian spiritual dimension, the terreiros that once operated there, the history the ground holds.
And if journalism was the intellectual gateway to Rio, samba was the emotional one. Aline talks about her relationship with the genre like someone describing a round-the-clock companion. She wakes up to Paulinho da Viola on the record player, also opening her playlist to beloved references like Dona Ivone Lara, Martinho da Vila, and Clara Nunes — for her, "a feminine entity in samba," whose importance transcends the discussion about authorship and composition.
But it was a recent encounter that captured what samba represents in its relationship with the city. While interviewing Moacyr Luz at Renascença, Aline experienced something unexpected: during the recording, the composer promised to write a samba in her honor, and he did. The song speaks of the hope for a better world.
For Aline, Luz embodies something she identifies as the carioca essence: the insistence on living, on bringing people together, on finding beauty even when everyday life insists on hiding it. The meeting between the two was, in her words, a mutual recognition — he makes samba so that Rio's working people keep waking up; she does journalism so that people keep believing. A samba for infinity.
