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Rio Film Festival 2004 Amazonas film festival 2004 Havana Film Festival 2004 Marseille Festival 2005 Mar Del Plata Festival 2005 Paris Brasilian Film Festival 2005 Belém Film Festival 2005 Brasilian Miami film festival 2005 Festival de Huelva 2005 Associação Paulista dos críticos de Arte 2005 The Foreign Press 2005
“ Dense, agile and cheerful in the right measure... Bauraqui creates an impression for his versatility and Ciocler offers the public a contained, subtle, convincing performance. With the appropriate mood, Lúcia lightens her heavy story through comic relief." “Almost Brothers has strength enough to be the best Brazilian film of this year”. " The scene where Jorginho (Flavio Bauraqui) tries to comfort his friend Miguel (Caco Ciocler) is cathartic and it already belongs to the anthology of Brazilian cinema." It's rare that documentaries upstage fiction films on the same subject, but the festival entries by John Sayles (Silver City) and Wim Wenders (Land of Plenty) were pallid by comparison. Instead, it took a Brazilian filmmaker to bring history and current events together into one satisfying fictional whole. Lúcia Murat's Almost Brothers examines the failure of idealism and the intergenerational conflict that seals its downfall. From the violent prisons of the former dictatorship to the violent favelas of today, her characters play out the dynamics of race, class, and ideology. Think City of God, with its Hollywood shenanigans deleted and three decades of politics inserted. Murat is committed to examining the ties that bind the present to the past. We could use somebody like her here in the United States. “Lúcia Murat has constructed a political fable with rigor and sensibility that evokes the militant look of a certain epoch in Latin American cinema. For us today this vision is even more essential because it lets us return to the question. At a moment where all political ideas in the Western world transformed themselves into simple utopias, leaving the leaders the function of directing thought, Murat’s film comes like a breath of fresh air. With “Almost Brothers” the director shakes social and political dynamics and presents us with a reflective and fiercely cruel discussion. “But the Grand Prix, announced to an ecstatic audience, goes to Almost Brothers, Lúcia Murat's brilliant Brazilian entry. This outstanding feature about the contrasting lives of two prisoners - one an educated white political protestor, the other an impoverished black thug - is a thoroughly deserving winner, one that serves as further proof of the emerging strength of Brazilian cinema.” |
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