Pixote

Not since Buñuel's Los Olvidados has the plight of kids in Third World urban poverty been so acutely affecting; and not since Truffaut's 400 Blows has a child actor (da Silva) so etched his tragic delinquency on the memory of middle-class audiences. Even allowing for the institutional horrors depicted in Scum, nothing in recent cinema comes close to the devastating account of brutalisation and exploitation offered in Babenco's film about a 10-year-old boy who somehow survives the vicious oppression of the reform school, to escape and find his way into dope-dealing, prostitution and murder in the Brazilian underworld. Originally labelled a 'denunciation' film in Brazil for its critique of a social system that fails to prevent the majority of the country's three million homeless kids from turning to crime, Pixote arrived here laden with art cinema awards for its exposé of a problem which, for all its cultural remoteness, carves into your conscience with the sudden thrust of a flick knife in a street fight.