Linha de Passe (2008)

Winner for Best Actress (Sandra Corveloni) at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival , Linha de Passe takes a look at poor Sao Paulo youth’s limited options through the lives of four brothers with the same mother but different fathers who aspire to be football players. By focusing on fatherless boys trying to make their way in life without resorting to criminality, the atmospheric film consciously positions itself as an alternative to flashier recent Brasillian fare steeped in drugs and death, and addresses serious issues without insisting on its own self-importance. Directed by Walter Selles (“Diarios de motocicleta/The Motorcycle Diaries, Central do Brasil/Central Station”)


Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas's Linha de Passe was born from their mutual desire to look at how Brazil had changed twelve years after they made Foreign Land. The film focuses on four fatherless brothers and their pregnant, still unmarried mother. Living in cramped quarters amid the concrete jungle of São Paolo, they represent millions of others, struggling to make a living while flirting with the temptations thrown their way as they scramble to get ahead or simply try to survive. The result is a deeply humanistic portrait of the stresses and strains placed on a commonplace family.
At the core of Linha de Passe is a tireless mother whose only release is soccer; she avidly cheers on the local team with the rest of the city. Many of her hopes have been invested in her eighteen-year-old son Dario, a gifted soccer player who dreams of turning professional. (Dario is played by Vinícius de Oliveira, the young boy in Salles's Central Station, and it is a revelation to see him a decade later.) Dênis, her eldest, holds down a job as a motorcycle courier, trying to support a child he has fathered. Emotional and irresponsible, he lives his life from moment to moment. Dinho, the serious one, pumps gas, his life centred on a small evangelical church that gives him a sense of hope. Finally, there is the young and rebellious Reginaldo, who is obsessed with finding the father he has never met.
Salles and Thomas make the heat and sweat of the city palpable, but they are concerned with far more than surface reality. Working largely with non-professional actors, they bring a distinctly neo-realist style to the material (Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers springs to mind). Diligent attention to research and detail clearly pays off, and by setting the film against the backdrop of soccer and Catholicism, two immense cultural forces in Brazil, Salles and Thomas manage to tap into deep reservoirs of meaning. Criminality flirts around the fringes of the narrative, but the filmmakers set their characters the task of struggling with a series of complicated moral issues. What they expose are people who do not always take the easy way out.- –( Toronto International Film Festival 2008 )