2 Filhos de Francisco / Two Sons of Francisco
January 9th, 2006 by Andre Soares
In the New York Times, Larry Rohter writes about last year’s biggest box-office hit in Brazil, 2 Filhos de Francisco / Two Sons of Francisco. Directed by Breno Silveira, the film tells the rags-to-riches story of two poor rural boys who grew up to become one of Brazil’s biggest sertanejo (the national "country" music) singers. 2 Filhos de Francisco is Brazil’s submission for the Best Foreign-Language Academy Award.
Rohter’s article is quite readable, though I do have a few quibbles with it. The current Brazilian president, generally known by his nickname, Lula, was never really a peasant. He was born in the rural Northeast, but his family migrated to the industrial south when he was still quite young. Also, the article never explains why the Portuguese-speaking sertanejo singers cut a Spanish-language record in English-speaking Nashville. (Are they trying to break into the Spanish-language market? Are they already famous in Spanish-speaking countries?) And finally, to say that 2 Filhos de Francisco "offers a glimpse of a Brazil that is little known outside the country’s borders" is to ignore one of the biggest Brazilian film hits in the international market, Walter Salles’s Central do Brasil / Central Station (1998), which is mostly set in that country’s rural Northeast. (In the last five years, at least two other Brazilian films set in the poverty-stricken Northeast opened commercially in Los Angeles. Even though most Brazilian films depict the lives of working- or middle-class, urban Brazilians, I can’t think of a single internationally renowned Brazilian movie in the last several years that was set anywhere besides Rio’s slums or the Northeastern hinterlands.)
Note: The two films I referred to in the previous paragraph are Andrucha Waddington’s Eu Tu Eles / Me You Them (2000) and Walter Salles’s Abril Despedaçado / Behind the Sun (2001).
Addendum: If 2 Filhos de Francisco becomes an international hit, I’ll have to add “Midwestern hinterlands” to my shortlist above. I’d like to thank Welington Liberato for pointing that out to me.
Lula watched pirated DVD of 2 Filhos de Francisco
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2 Filhos de Francisco is not set in northeast of Brasil, is set in center-west, close to Brasilia, our capital, and the vegetation, culture and people are quite different. In this terms, Larry Rohter is right.