True/False Films

Secret Screening Green

This film is fully or mostly subtitled.

In person: director

"My father was father long enough to make me," says one subject in this haunting documentary. "My mother was mother long enough to give birth." Following two boys cast adrift amidst unimaginable poverty in Brazil's northeast, this film reveals, in quiet and deeply moving ways, the resourcefulness and creativity of children surviving a tough world. Just 14, Cocada witnessed his dad's murder; his friend Nero, 13, is the oldest of his mom's 10 children. Begging at truck stops, selling knickknacks and foraging for food, the two grow up abnormally quickly while maintaining some childlike innocence, wrestling in a pile of corn husks or asking for guidance from a kindly trucker. The directors, who also shot the film, maintain a formal purity — there is no voiceover or interviews. Still, they find ways to implicate Brazi's leadership: we hear the empty promises of campaigning politicians through loudspeakers and the TV. The footage — villagers elbowing each other to get to the water truck, a dying cow beset by flies — reveals darker truths. (JS)