Rio Breaks world premiere
Rio Breaks isn't another surf film. It's a story - about friendship and survival, surfing and life.
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Just when you thought the surf film had reached its upper limit - that the architects of the genre, trapped inside a circle of the same old hackneyed formula, were incapable of producing anything fresh - along comes a slice of celluloid brave enough to break the mould.
Rio Breaks isn't another surf film. It's a story - about friendship and survival, surfing and life.
Thirteen-year-old Fabio and twelve-year-old Naama are best friends, trying to navigate their way through life in a favela near Arpoador Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Every day, they walk down from the hills to surf at their local break, passed the bullet holes and gunshots that form the fabric of their world and towards the community that's taken root on the sand. Here, they get a glimpse of a life where kids can be kids, and where nothing bad can reach you when you're deep within the source.
The film takes lead from the boys, trailing just behind them as they drift around the cusp of an adolescent awakening, capturing their every footstep in luminescent shades. After an engrossing introduction to their characters and the landscape they inhabit, innocence starts to show itself for the fleeting moment it is and, as the boys' histories are slowly revealed, the reality of life 'on the hill' begins to rear its ugly head.
But this isn't a documentary about 'another culture'. Nope - while lesser filmmakers continue to throw their protagonists under a microscope tainted with a missionary mentality, the guys behind Rio Breaks refuse to distance themselves (and us, for that matter) from the boys with the kind of overarching statements about 'those poor folk in the developing world' that help anxious Western minds sleep better at night.
Instead, they fulfill their responsibilities as observant documentarian and let the boys talk for themselves, following in their shadow as they pick their way through the trials they face. This isn't a politically-laden message about a people and a place (safely) far away from ours. It's just a story about two boys, charting a very particular path through life. And it's a subtle one at that, pinned together in beautiful form.
Rio Breaks premieres at the Rio Film Festival October 2 while the U.S. premiere will be in Hawaii later this month.
Check back soon for more details on premieres of the film and interviews with the folks who made it.
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Rio Breaks world premiere (text) by Andrea Kurland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (7)
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highly recommend, especially if you feel overwhelmed by the amount of filmed content from this part of the world in recent years - this is effortless
The film will be airing in France in November - but we've yet to find out exactly where and when. Keep checking back and we'll let you know.
Andrea
The soundtrack seems fantastic, any information there too ?
We will be sure to announce it on the blog when details are confirmed.
Cheers,
Ed