My Mom Is a Character

A Brazilian comedy that came out of a stage show. Dona Hermínia is a middle-aged mother. Her husband has left with a younger woman, her children are grown and pay her no attention. She looks after the house and everyone in it and nobody notices. One day she walks out and goes to her sister's, and there she begins to think again about her own life. The starting point is the one-woman show Paulo Gustavo wrote and staged in 2006. It caught on quickly in Rio de Janeiro and ran for years. The character was drawn from his own mother. Gustavo plays Dona Hermínia in the film himself. The comedy comes not from exaggeration but from recognition: the mother's way of speaking, the repeated sentences inside a household and the daily bargaining with children land directly for a Brazilian audience. It was the country's most-watched production of 2013 and reached over four million viewers. Two sequels followed. The right place to start for anyone curious about Brazilian popular cinema and family comedy. For a viewer distant from the cultural context, some of the jokes do not survive translation.