Ventos de Agosto (Gabriel Mascaro, 2014): Brasil

Reviewed by Ke Shen. Viewed at AFIFest 2014.

The movie was directed by Gabriel Mascaro. It is a movie about a young girl lived in a small village in Brazil and some unusual things happened to their usual life. The movie focus on the girl, who is she, what does she do.

The graphic seems great, director didn’t focus on middle but switch audience’s focus to the sides and then focus on middle which seems great to me. Lots of directors today tend to focus on middle to keep audience attention. I have seen this not focus on middle way as well as in Interstellar by Christopher Nolan. Furthermore, I believe this is the best sound effect movie I have seen in the whole AFI festival. Director personally did these things, he showed how he did that in the movie, however, this made me feel confused. I don’t want spoil to much, I can only say the character who record all the wind sound seems unnecessary. Maybe this is a new experiment way to film or it is like Annie Hall that Woody Allen tried to did.

Furthermore, the main character, the girl’s boyfriend played an important role. As audience, we can tell how he has changed through the whole movie. In my point of view, this is not a movie only focus on the small village but also something bigger. Something like the differences between two generations, the differences between city and countryside, the differences between women and men. The young couple worked on a coconut plantation that they drove a truck to move all the coconuts. The boyfriend also fish octopus. These seems like a really simple way of living. When something unusual happened, they all react differently, not only them boyfriend’s father act totally different from himself. The father focus more on the family living instead of finding something new. He already lost the eager of curiosity. It is like a deep line to me. The difference between different generation.

In sum, it is a great movie worth a shot if you like Brazil and don’t know anything else besides their soccer team and Samba.