Title: Central Station

Director: Walter Salles

Central Station: A Journey of Self-discovery and Hope

In Brazil, the connotation that the people know is that it is a country dominated by

Catholicism and extreme cases of poverty. Beautifully filmed, Salles is able to delineate a new

image for Brazil: an image of hope amidst adversity and of love amidst hatred. Although, in

reality, the people here are faced with the harsh sufferings of life, Central Station unequivocally

shows that even there is only a slightest light of hope present, it can still affect a persons life

with such great impact. More than being a devout Catholic, Brazil seemingly values the practice

of having compassion and a family.

In Central Station, the audience sees a child named Josue who is imposed by fate onto a

grumpy old woman named Dora. Dora is a former schoolteacher who earns her living writing letters

in Central Station for the illiterate. She spends all day listening to the heartfelt thoughts of strangers,

writes them down and then makes cruel fun of them when she gets home and Dora never bothers to

mail them. Josues mother dictates a letter to her absent husband, then Josue and his mother leave the

station and his mother is killed by a bus. Suddenly, the boy knows no one and has no place to go.

Despite her bitterness and loathe, Dora reluctantly takes him home. Unfortunately, Dora

wants to sell Josue to an adoption racket to get a new television set in return. But Doras conscience

wont let her sleep, so she gets Josue and decides to bring this boy to his long lost father. Dora and

Josue go to the countryside to find his father, and in the end, they are able to. But Dora does not

realize that her journey and the hardships they have gone through with Josue are the things that made

her feel human again-- her hard-bitten soul is now full of hope and love that she discovered the better

version of herself.
 Central Station is a film about looking for affection and solidarity and how two people make

it into a reality. It talks about compassion as the quivering of the human heart in response to

suffering: a sign of the restoration of faith in humanity.

The film has to have a connection to its viewers, and what I like about this film is that it

shows the humanistic value of the film, in which connected its viewers: people you hardly know can

cause you to be affected by the film because it touches millions of hearts. It also touches the concept

of having a family, and that families are considered to be an integral part of who we are. Thats

why both of them become in peace when Josue finally discovers his brothers and Dora, and Dora

discovers Josue. This film brings two people in a vast country wherein they journey to find a

missing a father only to realize in the end that they (Dora and Josue) already found a family. Its

as though two lost souls found each other unexpectedly.

The film not only exposes their practice of valuing families, it also exposes Brazil as a

country of devout Catholics and how it is part of who they are as a country. There are some scenes

where they show Catholic practices and traditions, and they even reinvented the pieta by inverting

the roles of the mother and the son. Another manifestation of this devotion is the names of its

characters: Josue, Jesus, Moses, Isaiah, etc.

Brazil, undeniably, is a place where you can see the faces of its people despite the

poverty they are surmounting: faces that are full of hope, full of energy. Salles, being also

exposed in making documentaries, stirringly exposes the world of Brazil with the impoverished

rural landscape, giving the film a sense of reality and its dreadfulness. proves that behind this

situation they have a wonderful vocation and culture to be a great country: they are alive.