Pietra Quintela
Rosa / Áurea
Overview
A sheltered teenager discovers she's actually a princess from another country — and she could be in grave danger. Based on Paula Pimenta's novel.
Cast
12 people
Reviews
5 min readThe Princess Who Woke Up Too Soon
I’ll admit it: I went into Sleeping Princess expecting a light, frothy Brazilian take on Sleeping Beauty, something that might charm its way through an 80-minute runtime with a few musical numbers and a happily-ever-after. What I got instead was a film that feels like it was edited in a blender—one set to "pulse" rather than "puree." The fairy tale is here, all right, but the magic?
Not so much.
Cláudio Boeckel’s adaptation of Paula Pimenta’s novel isn’t just unoriginal; it’s aggressively uninterested in originality. The premise—a sheltered teenager named Rosa (Pietra Quintela) discovers she’s a princess from another country and is suddenly in mortal danger—sounds like the setup for a YA franchise starter. Instead, it plays like a first draft someone forgot to revise.
The pacing lurches from one underdeveloped beat to the next, as if the film itself is in a hurry to get to the credits. (Maybe it is. At 80 minutes, it’s over before you’ve even finished your popcorn.)
The problem isn’t just that Sleeping Princess borrows its structure from a thousand other teen fantasy romances. It’s that it doesn’t seem to understand why those stories work. Take the inciting incident: Rosa learns she’s royalty, and within minutes, she’s whisked away to a new life in a vaguely European-looking kingdom.
There’s no awe, no wonder, no sense of stakes. The film treats her transformation from ordinary girl to princess as a plot point to be checked off, not a moment to be savored. Compare this to, say, The Princess Diaries, where Anne Hathaway’s Mia Thermopolis spends half the movie resisting her new identity before finally embracing it.
That resistance—her fear, her humor, her humanity—is what makes the story compelling. Here? Rosa nods, packs a bag, and moves on.
The emotional core of the fairy tale is missing, replaced by a checklist of genre beats.
The supporting characters fare no better. Maisa Silva, who played a delightfully spunky Cinderella in DJ Cinderella (2019), is wasted here as a sidekick whose sole purpose seems to be delivering exposition. The villain, when they finally appear, is so undercooked they might as well be a mannequin with a grudge.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsMaisa came back as the DJ. The new princess had never led a movie.
UOL Splash was on the Rio set in mid-2023. Pietra Quintela, known from SBT's Poliana Moca, was playing Rosa. Maisa Silva was there as DJ Cinderela, the same Cintia Dorella she played in 2019's Cinderela Pop. Five years later, Maisa told Splash the return filled her head with what the character had lived since then. Now she is a woman, living abroad, sure of herself, past the old fights. latestnetflix.com's take is that Pietra told Capricho this was her first time as a film lead."It will stay in my heart forever." 
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The source is Paula Pimenta's 2014 novel, the second Princesas Modernas book after Cinderela Pop. Portuguese Wikipedia lists Panoramica as producer, Manequim Filmes and Warner Bros. Discovery as coproducers, Claudio Boeckel as director. Marcelo Saback and Bruno Garotti wrote, with Paula Pimenta and Lara Rodi. Runtime 80 minutes. Theatrical date 15 August 2024. Netflix later put it on the US catalog as Sleeping Princess, TV-14, Portuguese original. TMDB keeps the original title Princesa Adormecida. , ,
Splash's Filipe Pavao watched scenes and mapped the fairy tale onto the Brazilian cast. The jealous woman in disguise is Marie, played by Patricia Franca. The three uncles who overprotect Rosa are Florindo, Fausto, and Petronio, played by Aramis Trindade, Claudio Mendes, and Rene Stern. Pietra told Splash she is used to Disney princesses who all look the same and wanted a modern one. "I don't need anyone, I am my own boss, I want freedom." Paula Pimenta told the same reporter she modernized the girls so they chase their own plans instead of waiting for a prince. She also said she is picky about films that stay close to the books.
Capricho got the trailer and the 15 August date in June 2024. Pietra said it was one of the jobs she was most anxious for people to see. "I hope the audience loves Rosa." Maisa said Cinderela Pop still sits in a special place and that Pimenta's books were part of her teens and of thousands of others in Brazil. Paula said seeing characters she wrote alone years ago on screens across the country still feels a little like magic. Capricho also noted Cinderela Pop had drawn more than 500,000 spectators. ,
On set, Pietra and Livia Silva, who plays best friend Clara, had to learn French lines they did not know. Pietra told Capricho she laughed imitating the sounds. Livia said they only had to worry about the text because the chemistry was already there. Paula told Capricho that Maisa's cameo matches the book, the two princesses meeting. She also said a third adaptation, Princesas das Aguas, was in pre-production, with a hoped-for shoot the next year. That is a plan, not a finished film.
The old one-source recap that treated this as a mystery-box Sleeping Beauty with no trailer was wrong. Warner and Manequim sold a date, a poster, and a trailer in June. Netflix is the later window, not the first one. , ,
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.