Eduardo Pop Movies

The troubled life of one of Brazil's most legendary sports heroes is brought to the screen in this drama based on the true story of Heleno de Freitas. As a young man, Heleno (Rodrigo Santoro) displayed a remarkable talent for football (known as soccer in North America), and his intense, powerfully physical playing style soon made him a star, despite his arrogant attitude and failings as a team player. In the early 1940s, Heleno seems poised to lead his team to the World Cup championship, and he earns a reputation as a notorious ladies' man, despite the fact he's married and has children. While World War II was little felt in Brazil, the war in Europe kept World Cup tournaments from being held in 1942 and 1946, preventing Heleno from achieving his greatest dream, and his unwillingness to cooperate with coaches and teammates (as well as a growing dependence on drugs) ends with him being traded to a team in Argentina. Heleno's reckless love life begins catching up with him as his long-standing relationship with a sexy nightclub entertainer, Diamantina (Angie Cepeda), drives a final stake through the heart of his marriage, and Heleno contracts a venereal disease which he refuses to have properly treated. Heleno was an official selection at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

The Portuguese-produced, Gulbenkian Foundation-funded omnibus film The State of the World (O Estado do Mundo, 2007) joins September 11 (2003), Paris, Je T'Aime (2006), and other feature-length works made around the same time that resurrect the form and structure of the classic "episode picture." Like the aforementioned titles, the scope here is international: six directors from around the globe were each invited to contribute a sketch of around 15 minutes, on the theme of sociocultural change as it occurs transcontinentally -- change in populace, landscape, economy, and/or lifestyles. The directors who agreed to participate include Belgian Chantal Akerman, Portuguese Pedro Costa, Thai Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Chinese Wang Bing, Brazilian Vicente Ferraz, and Indian Ayisha Abraham.

Weerasethakul's segment, "Luminous People," opens the picture, and depicts one Thai family's ash-scattering ceremony following the death of a beloved relative, as they cruise down the Mekong River in a boat between Laos and Thailand. The director utilizes a broken stream of metonymical shots to create a dreamlike, gossamery ambience, and consciously resists any explanatory voice-over or interpretation, instead encouraging his subjects to reflect on the meaning of the ceremony in voice-over. Next up is Ferraz's contribution, "Germano" -- a message-laden allegory about the elderly Brazilian fisherman of the title (Paschoal Vilaboim), saddled with a minimal crew, who must pilot his tiny vessel beyond its safe and shallow haven and venture boldly into deep waters to draw a healthy catch. En route, however, he must face a lull in the dreaded doldrums and the presence of a mammoth Russian oil tanker. Abraham helms the third segment, "One Way" -- a documentary piece that meditates on the life of Shyam Bahadur, a Nepali emigrant who works as a security guard in Bangalore. Per its title, Bing's fourth segment, "Brutality Factory," bombards the audience with a compendium of almost assaultive images, depicting factory ruins culled from his movie West of the Tracks. Bing then shifts the form of the segment from documentary to docudrama, by filming scripted scenes that depict the torture inflicted by the government on alleged counterrevolutionary dissidents during the notorious Cultural Revolution. A wife is ordered, under threat of execution, to betray her husband. She refuses and is promptly murdered, prior to the sickeningly ironic revelation that the husband committed suicide in 1967. Costa's acclaimed fifth segment, "Tarrafal," unfolds in a dilapidated shack in the outlying regions of Lisbon, where a mother and her son huddle protectively and reflect on the destruction of their Cape Verde home. The mother tells the son a fantastic story about a Boogeyman saddled with the task of determining who is to die, in his roamings throughout the world. Akerman closes the picture with a conceptual art piece -- a montage set in Shanghai, depicting the advertisements for popular products on the sides of buildings and boats. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi