Half Brother

Half Brother began its gestation in 2008, when I returned to São Paulo after four years in Rio de Janeiro. With acquired distance and perspective on the city where I had been born and grew up and – more important – a daughter who was 12 years old at the time, I found I had a different viewpoint on my native city’s realities and the conflicts experienced by youth in its urban environments.

These young people, coming of age in developing countries' metropolises, find they've got pre-scripted roles in the machinery of consumption and media. Space for individuality and the capacity to make impact on society have become quite unattainable. Lack of hope in the future and of faith in democratic institutions confine this generation within a vast dystopia. What is left is a state of suspension, a persistent hope for things that aren't even on the horizon.

The reactions by these youth who inhabit the gaps of uncertainty became acutely visible in the demonstrations that occupied Brazil's streets in 2013—and then dissipated as fast as they had appeared, confirming aspects of ephemerality.

Half Brother, the film, contemplates this suspension, an emotional state in which people are compelled to go on without rational explanations and with little chance of gaining control over their own realities. In this anguishing and anxiety-ridden condition it is hard to project a future because those living it are anchored to uncertainty.

This suspension is a fixture of life in today's world. Exhaustion of the environment, growth of emergent totalitarianisms, and the widening abyss that separates spheres of power from ordinary daily lives have profound impacts on the individual. In their actions, Half Brother's characters' reflect and echo this situation and the feelings it provokes: fear, angst and vulnerability, but also compassion, desire, and lucidity.

The film's plot grew out of a desire to address the voids and gaps of the hearts and minds of those who must coexist in highly competitive, ever more virtual urban environments burdened with huge social challenges, keeping it's focus on the lower-middle-class youth who live in São Paulo, one of the huge cities of the developing world.

This constituency is seldom portrayed in Brazilian cinema, despite the fact that it comprises an enormous population. Putting this context at the center of its narrative, the film gives visibility to specific social questions, among them urban violence, the absence of viable public space in the periphery of the city, the difficulties of exerting sexuality, and subtle forms of racial unease.

Figuring prominently in the film’s discourse and debate is ubiquitous surveillance by security cameras, demarcating the fine line between the demand for more powerful tools to combat violence and the perverse control of citizens.

Engaging in questions that impact people and their lives, the film establishes a connecting point for the viewer to the story, stimulating reflection on the themes and issues addressed, and it also constitutes a space for artistic creation, at times sparking questions that may reach beyond the story’s original intentions.