Day 140: Neighboring Sounds (O Som ao Redor - July, 27)

The old ways, the new ways, the current matters... nothing seems to change.

The perverse background to a established community is presented in a peculiar and gripping narrative in Kleber Mendonça Filho's directional debut, Neighboring Sounds (O Som ao Redor). Unfortunately, I've missed the movie in the theaters, but finally i could be amazed by its way to tell a fundamental story on this day. 

The title is not for nothing. The sounds of a neighborhood in Recife, a big and beautiful city at the northwestern Brazil, are true narrators here. The great  care on the sound design (also by Kleber) is a form to put us inside the lives of its inhabitants. To insert us in what hides behind the banality of everyday life. We go through their day by day, their conflicts, love interests, difficulties... and, like them, we pass through all this without being aware of a greater danger, one that has been perpetrated since older times. Its established and even honored presence  in our time, in our neighborhood, is still astounding and horrid. An attentive look from a storyteller at his own community.

I absolutely loved this movie. It never fails to delight me how some filmmakers can tell about life in such a detailed and accurate way, through traditional or non traditional (as in this case) narratives. In those productions, we see life with a magnifying glass. We see our own faces in this magnifier: every pore, opened in order to absorb all around us, in an scathing manner. 

O Som ao Redor. Directed and written by Kleber Mendonça Filho. With:
Ana Rita Gurgel, Caio Almeida, Maeve Jinkings. Brazil, 2012, 131 min.,
Dolby Digital, Color/Black and White (DVD).

Fragments: Sense8 (again :), season 1, episodes 9 and 10.