Hector Babenco’s PIXOTE is a heartbreaking look at an extraordinary young boy
VIEWS OF YOUTH IN FILMS FROM THE COLLECTION: PIXOTE (Hector Babenco, 1981)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Friday, July 27, 8:00, and Monday, July 30, 4:30
Series runs through August 14
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
Hector Babenco’s gripping, heart-wrenching docudrama is set in São Paulo, where a group of young boys struggle to survive on the streets and in a reform school that is more like a prison. When four of them bust out, they get caught up in a dangerous life of drugs, prostitution, and guns. Marília Pêra won numerous international awards for her performance as a prostitute, but the film belongs to eleven-year-old Fernando Ramos da Silva, who plays the title character; you won’t be able to take your eyes off him, except to wipe away the tears. Unable to get his life together after the film, Fernando was later killed by police under suspicious circumstances when he was only nineteen. The Argentine-born Babenco went on to make such films as Kiss of the Spider Woman, Ironweed, and At Play in the Fields of the Lord, but Pixote is his masterpiece. Pixote is screening July 27 and 30 with Orlando Mesquita’s 2001 short, The Ball, as part of the MoMA film series “Unaccompanied Minors: Views of Youth in Films from the Collection,” being held in conjunction with the new exhibit “Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000.” Running through August 14, the festival includes such other compelling films about childhood as Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, Laslo Benedek’s Sons, Mothers, and a General, and Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter.