Brazilian film is among the top 10 of the year the NYT

Well done movies to win  the Oscar as Argo, Ben Affleck, and Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson, lost place for Brazilian Sound Around (Som ao redor) on a selection of the site of the newspaper The New York Times. Among the top ten films of the year, production of  Kleber Mendonça Filho appears in ninth place. Argo and Moonrise Kingdom receive only “honorable mentions”, along with others like Between Love and Passion, Sarah Polley, and A Perfect Choice, Jason Moore, who just premiered in Brazil.

The list is headed by the NYT Amour, coproduction between Austria, France and Germany directed by Michael Haneke. The film is followed by Lincoln, Steven Spielberg, Raging Dreamer in Benh Zeitlin, and Footnote, Joseph Cedar. In the fifth and sixth positions, the winners are The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson, and The Darkest Hour, Long Kathryn Bigelow about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The new Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Free, appears in seventh place, ahead of Goodbye First Love, Mia Hansen-Love, a coproduction between Germany and France. The flashlight is with The Chase, Long Joe Carnahan starring Liam Neeson.

A major national production of recent years, The Sound Around is a film that, by focusing on a street in a middle-class neighborhood of Recife, talks about an entire country, its social relations and violence in their daily lives. There, nothing seems abnormal children play ball, teenagers take their first kisses, the radio of a car is stolen … Clodoaldo (the great Irandhir Santos) offers its security services, which give some tranquility and cause distrust in others. To act on the stage of The Sound Around, he asks permission to “Colonel area,” the former plantation Francisco (WJ Flounder), owner of much real estate in the region.

Kleber Mendonça Filho builds the narrative from scenes seemingly loose, almost snapshots of everyday events, and from them weaves a rich panel of images and sounds of life of the Brazilian middle class, their fears and fights with neighbors. In many tense moments, hilarious in others, is the work of a mature director, although rookie in feature films.