Central Station

                                                  Central Station by Walter Salles

Central Station tells the story of Dora a letter writer in the Rio de Janeiro central station. She witnesses the death of a woman who she had just written a letter out for. Josue the sun stays in the central station until Dora decides to take him home but she secretly sells him to human traffickers. When she tells her best friend what she has done Dora feels regret and goes back to save Josue. They then take a bus trip to northern Brazil to find Josue’s father. She attempts to abandon the boy and leave instructions for him to finish the rest of the trip without her. Josue gets off the bus before it leaves and finds her at the bus station where she decides to finish the trip with him.

            The first place they check turns out to be a house where the owners bought the place from Josue’s father. They tell Dora that Josue’s father sold the house after he won a new house in a state lottery and moved away. Dora gets the address of the new house and they journey further to find him. When they finally get to the new house in a very recently constructed development they again discover someone other than his father is living there. These people tell them that Josue’s father no longer lives here and he has disappeared.

While waiting for a bus Dora and Josue discover that one of Josue’s brothers works nearby and comes to find them when he hears of strangers looking for his father. He takes them back to his house where he lives with another brother who runs a woodshop in the backyard. Dora reads them a letter their father had sent them awhile back in which it says he went to Rio to meet Josue’s mother. Dora decides that it would be best for Josue to stay with his brothers to wait and hope for their fathers return.

I came to understand two themes of Central Station are Illiteracy and human trafficking, which plague modern Brazil. The film shows a country where a large portion of the population is illiterate relying on others to write and read messages for them. Its quite surprising to see such a widespread problem in such a modern world because illiteracy is such a minuscule problem/ occurrence in America that we tend to assume that other large countries such as Brazil would be much more literate. Many problems with communication in the film would be easily improved if everyone could write back and forth with their loved ones.

The other topic is human trafficking, which is shown briefly to us through Dora’s sale of Josue to a corrupt couple that will either sell him or use him for his organs. Dora saves Josue from a terrible fate when she realizes how wrong it was to sell him as a way to buy a new television. This is something that probably happens quite often in countries like Brazil, except the part where someone rescues them; because as the film shows it is easy for a child to suddenly slip through the cracks of society if his parents are lost and no one is around to take care of them.

I really enjoyed this film because it often straddled the line between tearful moments and ones that held a redemptive beauty. At first I really hated Dora because of how selfish and uncompassionate she was, it seemed no one in society was willing to care about a poor little boy who just lost his mother. But as the movie went along she slowly started to grow close to and have feelings for this small boy. In the end the boy seemed to help her just as much as she helped him.  She seems to overcome some of the emotional problems she holds inside herself regarding her father and how she lived her life in a very embittered fashion.