Pureza

Renato Barbieri's film is drawn from a true story. A woman named Pureza sets out to find her son, who left home to work in mining in the Amazon and was never heard from again. To find him she takes work on the estates herself, and there she encounters something else. What she encounters is debt bondage. Workers are put into debt for the cost of their transport and their food, and the debt never closes; anyone who tries to leave is stopped at gunpoint. The information Pureza gathered played a part in the beginning of enforcement against these practices in Brazil. Dira Paes's performance carries the film. The telling is unshowy; rather than constructing a story of heroism it chooses to show how long and how tedious an ordinary mother's struggle was. The Amazon landscape is never prettified. Who it's for: those who like social drama based on real events and Brazilian cinema. Who it's not for: viewers who want to avoid scenes of forced labour and violence; the film shows them directly.