THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – Not to be missed
It’s not an Almodovar script, but there’s a little air of melodrama, both tragic and light, in To our children by the Portuguese actress and director Maria de Medeiros: it is about a son who disappeared during the Brazilian dictatorship and the complicated relationship between a mother and her daughter. This generational story, ample and romantic, is in the vein of all about my mother (1999), although To our children has its own power and fantasy, beyond its cousinhood with the Spanish filmmaker.
Born in 1965, Maria de Medeiros is a singular figure in Portuguese cinema, having crossed as an actress the worlds of Joao César Monteiro, Manoel de Oliveira and Teresa Villaverde… In her first feature film, April captains (2000), she took a warm look at the “Carnation Revolution”, the uprising of democratic officers that ended the Portuguese dictatorship in April 1974. Shot in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, To our children is no less political. Behind the apparent lightness of this portrait of a left-wing middle-class family, arise memories of a dictatorship that cannot be forgotten. A few wild beasts arising from the heroine’s hallucinations and nightmares are there to remind us of this.
Two parallel stories
Vera (Marieta Severo), a former activist against the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985), served time in prison and now runs an orphanage for HIV-positive children in Rio. She is separated from her lawyer husband (José de Abreu) and her relationship has frayed with her daughter, Tania (Laura Castro), a future magistrate who is finishing her studies. This one is in a relationship with Vanessa (Marta Nobrega), graphic designer: the two women have the project of having a baby, Vanessa dreams of carrying the child, but several artificial inseminations have failed. To our children is freely adapted from the eponymous play by Laura Castro (who therefore plays the role of Tania in the film), created in 2013, where Maria de Medeiros played the mother.
Two parallel stories will impact the peaceful daily life of Vera, busy educating the children and placing them in the appropriate families. The first thread of the story plunges into the past of this woman still haunted by the abuse and torture she suffered in prison, when she was pregnant with her first child, a boy whom the soldiers quickly took away from her. A young researcher, Sergio (Claudio Lins), bursts into her life: he introduces himself as the son of his former fellow prisoner (since deceased) and wants to know everything about the career of the former “guerrilla”. An affection is tied between Vera and this young man fallen from the sky, a sort of ideal son. But does Sergio really exist? Some surreal scenes leave open the hypothesis of a story that happens in the head. Nevertheless, the two actors deploy a certain talent to make credible the complicity that binds the thirty-year-old and the one who could be his mother.
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