Central Station

Central Station (1998) begins at the main railway station in Rio de Janeiro. Dora, a retired teacher, sets up a table there and writes letters for people who cannot write. She posts very few of them; she takes them home and puts them in a drawer or tears them up. When one of her customers is hit by a bus outside the station, the woman's son is left with nobody, and Dora ends up taking him north across the country to find his father. The idea is in the letters. Dora writes down the most private things people have to say and values none of it; the journey slowly dismantles that indifference. Walter Salles directed. Fernanda Montenegro plays Dora and Vinícius de Oliveira the boy. He had been shining shoes and Salles found him at an airport; he had never acted. Montenegro was nominated for Best Actress, the first performance in Portuguese nominated in that category. The film was also nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. It won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1998, where Montenegro also won Best Actress. It was shot in the real Central do Brasil station and in the north east of Brazil, with the crowd scenes filmed among actual passengers. It runs 111 minutes. Good for: road films, Brazilian cinema, and a single commanding performance. Less good for: the pace is slow and the plot follows a familiar shape. Dora's transformation feels fast to some viewers. The religious sequence near the end departs from the realism of everything around it.