It is a quiet movie, if one think about this big blockbusters with explosions and car racing in high speed in monstrous highways. It is a movie that leads the audience into reflections. To reflect about misery and how people fight it daily, to reflect about poverty, and again, how people overcome it day after day after day. And it is a movie that shows us that even the most suffered and miserable of people can look at the horizon with hope, can find love and e brave enough to invest in it, can move on with life even though everything is always taken from him. It seemed to me at first that Cristiano was just a guy with a horrible bad luck. But in the end of the movie I realized Cristiano was a man with an incredible faith in life, in love, in starting again, in finding himself in the middle of his daily misery, in the middle of the daily aggression and suffering of a country that has had his dreams crushed by corruption and violence. Cristiano says in the end: "I was still breathing", a metaphor for a whole country, we are still breathing, we are still alive and we will fight for our right to live a simple life, full of love and hope, full of friendship, full of simple pleasures, like singing with a friend in a tangerine farm. Another great point of the movie is that it shows a different version of Brazil, a version that might be strange to the international public: it shows the countryside. It shows a part of Brazil that is almost unknown, but that ironically is what composes the greatest part of the geographical territory of a continental country: the countryside. The simple, silent, humble people that work in farms, quarries, construction, factories. The international public knows the Brazil of parties and half naked women. The Brazil of soccer. But Brazil is much more than that. We are a complex place, struggling to find our path in such a big world. This movie shows in a simple way that Brazil is more than that, is so much more than that. Also, I think the character André has a crucial function in the plot: it is through his eyes that we see Cristiano's life. It is through his reading of Cristiano's diary that we are able to find out what happened to that quiet factory worker, and how he got there. Ouro Preto is a colonial style city in the state of Minas Gerais, where I grew up. This movie took me home. It made me laugh with the simplicity of the people of my state, it made me cry to see how abandoned and miserably alone some people are in this life. But above all, this movie made me realize that one of the biggest powers we humans have in our minds and that makes us keep fighting through life is what moved Cristiano on: hope. I think the Brazilian audience is going to be enchanted by this movie, and will recognize itself in many of the adventures of Cristiano. I also think the international audiences will have the opportunity to get to know another Brazil, diverse from what they think of the country. It is a great chance to learn more about Brazil. I feel sad that not everybody got that. But alas! The movie is great. Go see it!
