| The Year My Parents Went on Vacation | |
| Native Name: | |
| Director: | Cao Hamburger |
| Cinematography: | Adriano Goldman |
| Editing: | Daniel Rezende |
| Music: | Beto Villares |
| Distributor: | Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures International |
| Runtime: | 103 minutes |
| Country: | Brazil |
| Budget: | $1.5 million |
The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (Portuguese: '''O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias''') is a 2006 Brazilian drama film directed by Cao Hamburger. The screenplay, which took four years to be completed, was written by Hamburger, Adriana Falcão, Claudio Galperin, Anna Muylaert and Bráulio Mantovani.
It was submitted by the Ministry of Culture for the 2008 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but was not nominated.[1] This choice was unexpected, since it was thought that José Padilha's Elite Squad would be submitted.[2]
In 2015, the Brazilian Film Critics Association aka Abraccine voted O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias the 98th greatest Brazilian film of all time, in its list of the 100 best Brazilian films.[3]
The story takes place entirely during a few months in 1970, in the city of São Paulo. Mauro, a 12-year-old boy, is suddenly deprived of the company of his young parents, Bia and Daniel Stein, who are political activists on the run from the harsh military government, which was strongly repressing leftists all over the country. Against this backdrop of fear and political persecution, the country is at the same time bursting with enthusiasm for the upcoming World Cup, to be held in Mexico, the first one to be transmitted live via satellite.
Unable to take care of their only child, the Steins, who live in Belo Horizonte, drive all the way to São Paulo to deliver the boy to his paternal grandfather, Mótel, who is a barber. To their son, they say they will travel on vacation and promise to return for the World Cup games. However, the grandfather dies on the same day the boy arrives, and he is left clueless and without support in Bom Retiro, a working-class neighborhood inhabited mainly by Jews, many of whom speak Yiddish, an unknown language to the boy. As his father is Jewish, the close-knit Bom Retiro community rally in support of the child and Shlomo, a solitary elder and religious Jew who was a close neighbor and friend of Mauro's grandfather, assumes the care of Mauro.
Mauro is a football enthusiast and wants to be a goalkeeper. He gradually mixes in with other neighborhood children and becomes acquainted with a number of colorful characters, including Hanna, a girl his age; Ítalo, a politically active student from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo; Irene, a beautiful female bartender and her boyfriend, the mulatto ace goalkeeper of one of the local football teams; the local rabbi and assorted Jewish elders, Italian immigrants, and so on.
To Mauro's great disappointment, his parents neither appear as promised at the World Cup nor give any notice. Fearing the worst, Shlomo starts to investigate by himself and is arrested by the political police because of his meddling. Finally, he achieves the release of Mauro's mother, who is severely ill after the prison term. Her reunion with her child happens on the very same day as Brazil's final victory at the World Cup. (Mauro's father disappears while in the dictatorship's clutches, never to return.) At the end of the film, Mauro says farewell to his recent friends and playmates as he and his mother leave Bom Retiro and prepare to go into exile.
The film is semi-autobiographical; the director's parents, physicists and professors at the University of São Paulo, were briefly arrested by the military in the same year of 1970, accused of lending support to "subversives". The couple's five children - including Cao Hamburger, the director, who was 8 years old - came under the care of their grandmothers, one Jewish and one Italian Catholic.
It played at various theaters in the United States throughout January and February 2008.[4] The official release date for the United States was February 15, 2008.[5]
The film has received mostly positive reviews from the public. It has an approval rating of 81% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 54 reviews, and an audience rating of 82%. The website's critical consensus states: "Hamburger deftly refracts the sociopolitical tumult of early '70s Brazil through the lens of a young boy's coming of age, and Joelsas' performance is wise beyond his years".[6] Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 67 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "generaly favorable reviews".[7] It has also received a rating of 3.7 of 5 stars on Letterboxd.[8]
Deborah Young of Variety hailed the film as "sensitive, delicate and involving", going on to say that "Hamburger feels no need (nor is there any) to underline the obvious. He has a magician's ability to keep the story light and believable". It also notes that "the humorous central part of the screenplay is bereft of surprises".[9] Marta Barber of the Miami Herald rated the film two-and-a-half out of four stars and praised Daniela Piepszyk's performance.[10]
Eduardo Valente, writing for Revista Cinética, praised the film for its handling of the social and political turmoil of 1970s Brazil without being heavy-handed in its execution, focusing on the characters rather than the environment. Valente made a point of noting that the political characters, Mauro's parents, only appear at the beginning and end of the film, which Valente said strengthened the coming-of-age narrative.[11] Wander Cabral, reviewing for Cineplayers, rated the film eight out of 10 stars, also pointing out that the film's focus is on Mauro's reactions to the turmoil - how it affects his childhood and innocence - rather than on the political turmoil that is a frequent setting in Brazilian historical films. Cabral also praises the technical aspects of the film, specifically mentioning the cinematography and music, and how they are utilized to express Mauro's emotions. Though Cabral did mention that the film could have been more melodramatic and emotional, he felt that such trappings weren't its purpose.[12]
Nick Schager of Slant Magazine, however, found the film to be just another in a long line of coming-of-age stories set in a period of political dissent. While Schager found the film "predictable", he did praise Hamburger for his "understatement" while lamenting that he found the story itself unremarkable.[13] Jeffrey Anderson of Combustible Celluloid also commented on how similar the story is to other films of the same genre, specifically comparing it to My Life as a Dog and Cinema Paradiso and saying that the film "has little to do with any actual human experience and everything with re-creating experiences from other movies."[14]
Ailton Monteiro, writing for ScoreTrack, gave the film four out of four stars and mentioned how Hamburger captured the mixed feelings that come with winning the World Cup among the political discord that permeated Brazil in 1970.[15] Marcelo Sobrinho for Plano Crítico points out that the film doesn't spend time in either debauchery or denouncing the regime; rather it is focused on Brazil's melancholy. Sobrinho praises Goldman's cinematography for visually capturing that emotion.[16]
The film was picked as Brazil's submission for the 2008 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film[17] (and was shortlisted alongside nine other films),[18] but it was not included among the finalists.[19] It received several other awards as well as additional nominations.