I liked the movie. It started as a documentary as some guy was talking about the harsh conditions in Brazil. What impressed me was that, as the guy mentioned, all the kid actors, including the main character Pixote played by Fernando Ramos Da Silva, were coming from the real world – from the poorest neighborhoods, with one mission in life – to survive.
Drugs, murder – Pixote has seen them all, and after reading the actor’s biography, I am inclined to think that he has seen this thing much before the idea of creating that movie came up. You could sense that in his acting.
Not only the horrors of street life are shown, the cruelty of the police and people who are in theory, responsible for people for problems who have found themselves arrested for some stupid crime – do they deserve to die for it ?!? And why does no one cares – but instead, the police and the director of the brothel in which Pixote is taken are trying to cover everything up – to avoid any responsibility, blaming everything upon the people they are supposed to help. In the movie, when a boy asked his mother to take him out of the place where he was locked up – she said, ” what could happen to you here ” – only she didn’t know, and he did not want to tell her – to describe the dimensions of the hell surrounding him – invisible to the outside world but existing. And I have to tell you that this is just as things are in real life – but no one cares…
