Where? The streets of Goiana in Brazil. Who? A cluster of those real, homeless kids
who hauntingly overpopulate Brazilian cities. How? “Film me, that’s all,” “Film here!”
and the camera passes from hand to hand, and the filmed become in their turn
cameramen, sound engineers and interviewers. And everything made with shots
that never stop surprising, jostling each other, dancing or whirling around like this
revolving door that makes dizzy the apartment bars in the background. When? Shot
initially over a period of two years twenty years ago, Claudia Nunes has revisited
this material from which she first made a short, Numéro Zéro; then after having found
and re-filmed some of the characters, she edited everything together. Without
thought for the chronology, but reflecting this permanent present where all these
faces and their words seem to live; from this fragmented mosaic emerges a
collective portrait, an epic trajectory where each, a hero, has his part. The remains
of this experience of direct cinema: the testimony of crippled childhoods. Examples
among others: a brutal eviction, a session of glue sniffing or the funeral of one of
them. Archive of a youth filmed without dramatization, without either cuteness or
miserabilism, in a film in black and white that presents itself as homage to vitality
and energy. (JPR)