Pixote

“A trenchant, uncompromising look at Brazilian juvenile delinquents, Pixote is a social exposé of the first order … Hector Babenco has made this tragic drama come vividly, even excitingly, alive through the extraordinary performances of his non-pro cast of slum youngsters.” – Variety

Four decades ago, more than half of Brazil’s population was below the age of 21, including over three million homeless children. Fresh-faced Pixote is one of them: a 10-year-old forced to grow up fast in the slums, exposed to brutal violence in overcrowded juvenile detention centres, and left to fight for survival in the country’s unforgiving underworld.

First screened at MIFF in 1982, Hector Babenco’s Golden Globe-nominated drama – called “of the five most important Latin American films in the past 50 years” by the New York Times’s Julian Schnabel – is a landmark piece of cinema, the gritty, gripping connective tissue between Italian neo-realism, Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, as well as recent youth-focused standouts such as City of God and Capharnaüm (MIFF 2018). With the original 35mm print having been painstakingly restored in 4K, along with the original soundtrack, this extraordinary work has never looked better on the big screen.

“Babenco’s imagery is realistic, but his point of view is shockingly lyrical. South American writers, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, seem to be in perfect, poetic control of madness, and Babenco has some of this gift, too.” – Pauline Kael in Foreign Affairs: The National Society of Film Critics’ Video Guide to Foreign Films

Contains depictions of high-impact sexual violence against children