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| Puisque nous sommes nés, France/Brazil 2008 |
Duret and Santana follow two teenage boys living in fairly extreme poverty in a rural Brazilian village. Nego, 13, is one of ten children born to a still-young but extremely world-weary single mom… He hangs out at a local truckstop/gas station with Cocada, a 14 year-old without a father who’s determined to learn to drive a truck or become a thief… The directors spent six months with Cocada, Nego and their families, shooting fly-on-the-wall style with zero filmmaker intervention. The result is something like a Dardennes film without the traditional, melodramatic beats that those Belgian brothers anchor their narratives with. Nego and Cocada’s stories, such as they are, emerge slowly out of layer upon layer of snapshot vignette, and can only end up in ellipsis. A tension is set up between the promise of Lula, the Brazilian president who is seen campaigning for a second term in the village by reminder the poor folks that live there that he used to be one of them… Cocada’s story comes to dramatize this tension when the boy becomes torn between two versions of manhood, one embodied by a truckdriver who takes Cochada under his wing (and thus offers a vision of urban independence), the other by a relative who makes bricks to trade for livestock… In the film’s most memorable moments, and those where its theses seem most seamlessly fused with its aesthetic aims, the boys sit around the truckstop, staring into the night, talking about their unpleasant present and their not-particularly grandiose but still probably unrealistic dreams of the future. “We have to leave here to know ourselves,” one says to the other. Self-knowledge has rarely seemed so tragically unattainable. – Karina Longworth, Spoutblog |
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