Casa de areia
Brazil,
2005, 103 min
Shown in 2006
CREDITS
- dir
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Andrucha Waddington
- prod
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Leonardo Monteiro de Barros, Pedro Guimarães, Pedro Buarque de Hollanda
- scr
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Elena Soárez
- cam
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Ricardo Della Rosa
- editor
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Sérgio Mekler
- mus
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Carlo Bartolini, João Barone
- cast
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Fernanda Montenegro, Fernanda Torres, Ruy Guerra, Seu Jorge, Luiz Melodia, Enrique Diaz, Stênio Garcia
- source
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Sony Pictures Classics, 550 Madison Ave 8th Floor, New York, NY 10022. FAX: 212-833-4190. EMAIL: sony_classics@spe.sony.com.
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COMMENTS
Andrucha Waddington in attendance.
OTHER
Andrucha Waddington has assembled some of the greatest talent in Brazil to relate this 19th-century saga of frustration, perseverance and redemption. Two of the country’s finest actresses, Fernanda Montenegro (Academy Award nominee for Central Station) and her real-life daughter Fernanda Torres (Best Actress for Parle-moi d’amour at Cannes), play a mother (Aurea) and daughter (Maria) abandoned in the wilds of northeast Brazil. Aurea's demented husband Vasco (famed director Ruy Guerra doing a turn in front of the camera) drags his family to the Maranhão region, a stunningly beautiful desert of shifting sand dunes and vast horizons, under the magnificent delusion that he can grow crops there. But Vasco dies soon after arriving. Thinking they are now free, the women attempt to return home. Waddington manages the pacing and mood to create a world where decades pass like minutes, and the tiny world of the women becomes a universe of its own. When an expedition of English scientists passes through and American warplanes fly overhead, they seem like strange emissaries from a distant world. Although thwarted in their original mission, the women find their lives punctuated by explosions of love, passion and fulfillment. In the end, the three generations of women—all played by Montenegro and Torres—have experienced a range of emotions as vast and beautiful as the desert itself. They remind us that human existence is a struggle and that living it to the fullest, regardless of the cards you’re dealt, is something to be celebrated.
—Miguel Pendás
FACTOID #109
Though the film had won two major awards at the Berlin Film Festival, John Cassavetes’ Love Streams was pulled from the SFIFF program at the last minute by the distributor. According to Cassavetes, MGM/UA was concerned that showing Streams, which the director himself proclaimed ’a crazy film,’ at the SFIFF might hurt the film’s box office upon wider release
