Dia dos Pais

At first sight, Dia dos pais, comes across as a road movie: a car speeds up a hilly road, oblivious to the landscape. The road leads through five small towns, each one like a ghost town. In the past, they had made their fortune from local coffee-growing and the architecture of the old mansions still recalls a splendour gone by. Yet, since 1976, since the train no longer stops there, no one comes to call. The farmers are dead, businesses closed. “When the tree was alive, all was well, but when the tree died, all the children left.” Now only the elderly and the poor remain. The old folk watch the trains race by, while the youngsters complain about the price of the school bus and kill time playing football. Others simply trust in God and magic. Yet a region never dies alone. Its death also sweeps the world away. For these shadows, suspended in time devoid of action, a visitor is a phantom. Even an announced arrival is beyond belief. One of the finest portraits in the film, that of a nurse who has stayed on with her invalid mother, begins with a misunderstanding: one was convinced that the filmmaker would not come, the other got lost on the way. An unknown address for an impossible encounter. This is the moment the road movie takes a sharp turn and plunges us into a Faulkner-like world: a violent past, a family ruined by its patriarch… the filmmaker’s family.