Rio De Janeiro Central Station

FRANCHEZCA PEREZ        

LAC 272

Midterm Essay

Poverty is a very complex issue that affects the reduction of welfare to the individual or deprive of some goods and services. Poverty also limits the most basic needs such as housing, health, education and affects the standard of living of families, people and societies. In Central Station (1998), an emotive journey of a former school teacher named Dora, who works at a Rio de Janeiro central station. She writes letters for customers and mails them and an 9 years old boy whose mother has just died in a car accident, Dora takes Josue and takes a trip with him to find his father. In contrast, In Pixote (1981), the cold reality of Pixote, a 10-year-old runaway homeless boy, that does everything to survive in a cruel Brazilian society. While seventeen years separate these two movies, both explore how the effects of poverty are intricately and deeply connected. However, whereas Central station illustrates how an orphaned child softens the heart of a selfish woman who finally realizes how important she can be in someone's life, Pixote demonstrates that living by the life of crime only escalates to violence and death.

In Central Station, Dora an egotistical and disagreeable woman, wrote letters in a small post at the central train station in Rio de Janeiro. Dora's clients were poor and illiterate in Brazil, among those clients there was a woman whose 9-year-old son, Josue wanted to meet his father whom he had never seen. But after sending two letters to the

father, who apparently live somewhere far to the north, Josue's mother was struck by a bus and died instantly. Leaving Josue orphaned and aimlessly by the train station.

To solve Josue's problem, Dora places him with people who are supposed to specialize in finding foreign adoptive parents. When Dora finds out that everything is a lie, they just want the children to sell and then they are killed to get their organs, Dora rescues Josue and start a journey to find Josue's father.

After several failed attempts and traveling from town to town in search of Josue's father, Dora runs out of money and Josue suggests that Dora should start writing letters again but this time not to people but to saints in whom people believed and wanted to do miracles to them. From that moment Dora receives unexpected gains from devotees who are eager to send many letters to the saints.

In “Pixote”, Pixote is a homeless teenager who is in a juvenile prison surrounded by street children in São Paulo. In this prison Pixote lives a nightmare where the sadistic guards torture and murder the young inmates. In this place lived very sad times, with much lack of love and even humiliated and even abused by people who are supposed to take care of them or at least keep them safe. Until one-day Pixote escaped with a transsexual partner named Lilica and her boyfriend, Dito. After their flight things changed a little but not much, they continued to live in a world full of violence, drugs, and sex.