They Don't Care About Us

Michael Jackson's controversial video was shot in Brazil's notorious Rio favila's by Spike Lee. MJ collaborated with 200 members and drummers from the social club Olodum to combine 'samba-reggae' music and hip-hop for this song.

Linha de Passe Wins Best Actress at Cannes

Sao Paulo. 20 million inhabitants, 200 kilometers of traffic, 300,000 messengers on motorcycles.

Walter Salle and Daniela Thomas have teamed once again to bring the socially conscious but not overtly politicalLinha de Passe to the screen. Sandra Corveloni, who plays their working-class mother in São Paulo won the best-actress award this weekend at Cannes.

At the heart of one of the toughest, most chaotic cities in the world, four brothers try to reinvent themselves in different ways. With the backdrop of Brazil in a state of emergency, every single one is looking for a way out.

Denis (João Baldasserini), the oldest, is one of the mass of motorcycles couriers daily transversing the swarming streets of Brazil; Dario (Vínicius de Oliveria), a talented soccer player hoping his skill at the game will be a path to a better life; Dinho (José Geraldo Rodrigues), tries his escape by joining an evangelical church; and youngest brother Reginaldo (Kaique de Jesus Santos), spends his days riding buses around the city, searching for his absent father.

de Oliveria, who previously starred in Salle's 1998 Central Station is the only professional actor among the four bothers, trained for four years in junior soccer league to play this role. However, Salles and Thomas achieve mastery in obtaining performances from all their young actors regardless of their acting experience.

Salles and Daniela Thomas have reunited to update their portrait Foreign Land made 12 years ago about urban Brazil, which they left in the economic throes of President Fernando Collor.

A Linha de passe is one of the most difficult of the futbol field-of-play rules (FIFA) that states an offensive player can’t be ahead of the ball and involved in the play unless there is a defender between him and the goalkeeper. Basically translated, the rule means a player is off-side, play is stopped and the equivalent in ice hockey would be a blue line offside or in basketball a zone violation. In other words, you can’t hang out at the other team’s goal waiting for the ball as your team comes down the pitch.

However, according to the filmmakers, Linha de Passe is also a children's game not unlike hackie-sack where a group of kids stand in a circle kicking a ball in the air, not to let the others down by letting the ball fall to the ground. Certainly, in Brazil both sides of this expression enrich the depth of the metaphor.

Salle and Thomas use the rule as a metaphor for the four Paolinistas brothers and their attempts to get ahead in modern Brazil.

MUTUM: Story of Brazil's Recent Past

Patricia and I went to the Walker Art Center to see MUTUM during the Women's in the Directors Chair series. This Brazilian film by Sandra Kogut is about a family on an isolated subsistence farm in the arid backlands of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Our central character is Thiago, a ten year old boy who knows little about the outside world except for a few horseback trips into a nearby village.

Thiago's father is distressed by a passing way of life and trying to provide for his family. His mother bares the burden of her husbands anger and frustrations and Thiago throws himself between them as his mother protector.

The feature film is an adaption of Jose Guimaraes Rosa's novel and while it is fiction, it strikes at the heart of Brazil true agrarian migration and the poverty that devastated rural Brazilian states like Minas Gerais and Bahia.

Religion plays a significant role in MUTUM, as the mystery of how nature delivers its fate evades common experience or a social consciousness thus becoming an acceptance of an authority beyond that which you can see or touch. But there is no preaching and deifying of faith.

In many ways, MUTUM reminds me of the brilliant German documentary film THE STORY OF THE WEEPING CAMEL for the intensity and detail of how they story is told. Not much dialog and visual detail aplenty, it keeps your head in the world in which Thiago lives. We feel the full power of a thunderstorm as dramatic as it can be in a place where a person is not constantly barraged with manufactured drama.

MUTUM is a mood-piece, a film that is evocative and deeply detailed in creating the sense of a simple life where children spend the day playing with insects, teaching the papagaio to talk, and chasing chickens. The pacing and lack of dialog set the viewer in a different spatial and temporal frame -- a pace of life that is nearly incomprehensible to modern western over-stimulated audiences. But MUTUM's unhurried observations are well worth the effort to persist in watching.

The young actor whose name is also Thiago is astonishing and the film, with all its subtlety and nuance pays off hugely at the end -- even with its small and unsensational emotion. The emotional impact is deep but not blunt. You may never get the chance to see this film but if you do, let it transport you into a different world than the one your are accustomed to living.

But for Patricia and I, MUTUM is a family story and tells the tale of how her own parents were sent from the warm and loving confines of a family with little connection to the outside world, out at an very early age into a world they could never have imagined. For Patricia this is the gripping backstory of Mauro and Odelva who were forced off the land in their early teens and sent to Sao Paulo with nothing to help them get their start. Life can be cruel. And this is a gripping story of a distinctive kind of cruel.

O Ano em que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias

Trailer: 2:24 minutes (Brazilian Portuguese)
Directed by: Cao Hamburger
Web site: http://www.oano.com.br/english/index.php

The Year My Parents Went on Vacation is a Brazilian film by Cao Hamburger set in the political turmoil of the 1970s. Mauro (Michel Joelsas) is a child living in the city with his radical leftist parents, forced into the underground and fearing his safety, sent him to live with his grandfather in a small town.

Just as Mauro arrives his grandfather dies and he is left trying to make due with strangers and maintain his passion for futebol as the World Cup in Mexico unfolds. This film won the audience award at Rio International Film Festival in 2007, played at Cannes and Berlin all through the year to high critical praise. Hamburger previously directed award winning television programs and "Filhos do Carnaval" for HBO. A Brazilian film worth watching for on DVD or renting.

A Casa de Alice

As we head into the award season for film in America there is often speculation about films from other countries that are in contention for the Best Foreign Film categories of the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards.

This year Brazil has a contender and its not about the typical hot film subjects we see coming out of South America's largest country and economy - street gangs, violence, poverty, kidnapping and samba. More than any film in a long time, this new film cuts against expectations to give us a richer appreciation for Brazilian life. It is very easy for Americans to get all worked up and think the average life of Brazil is living in favelas but nothing could be further from the truth.

A Casa de Alice or Alice's House is a slice of life film that more greatly profiles an average working class Brazilian woman played by Carla Ribas who has been winning best actress awards around the world. Director Chico Teixeira was influenced by Dogma and documentary-style dramatic films, giving this film a slice-of-life intimacy and makes the emotional intensity of everyday life more realistic.

The films central character, Alice is a manicurist and has been married for the last 20 years to Lindomar a taxi driver. Alice works in a beauty parlour, parents three children, the eldest of whom is doing his military service, and has a mother Dona Jacira, who is slowly going blind and works as a maid in her house. Alice's three siblings pay little attention to their mother, and they treat their grandmother with lack of respect.

The film has won big fans where it has shown in festivals in Sidney Australia, Chicago, Rio and is being hailed as a masterpiece. Definitely put this film on your lists to see for 2007.