29 June 2007
Director: Walter Salles
Cast: Fernanda Montenegro, Vinicius de Oliveira, Marilia Pera, Soia Lira Rating: 15
Length: 113min
Country: Brazil / France

Dora (Fernanda Montenegro) is a former school teacher who makes a living by writing letters for illiterate people passing through Rio de Janeiro’s main train station, Central do Brasil. Among her clients are Ana (Sôia Lira) and her nine-year-old son Josué (Vinicius de Oliveira), who has a fierce desire to meet his father, whom he has never seen.

But Dora’s life is about to change dramatically. The next day, soon after Ana returns to Central do Brasil with Josué and dictates a second letter to the boy’s father, she is hit by a bus after leaving the station and dies. Left alone with no relatives in Rio, Josué wanders aimlessly around the station.

Swayed by a curiously maternal compassion, Dora resists her initial impulse to make a quick profit off the child and commits to returning Josué to his father in Brazil’s remote Northeast. As buses and trucks carry the motley pair through the increasingly unfamiliar terrain, they defy their initial aversion to each other, journeying closer together and deeper inside themselves. The journey becomes a quest for their own identities: one boy’s search for his father; one woman’s search for her heart; a nation’s yearning for its roots.

See also:

Life imitates art at setting for 'Central Station': Article in the "Daily Yomiuri Online" of all places, about how the Brasilian government thought that writing letters for illiterates was probably a good idea, and set up a "Letter Center" in the Don Pedro II station in Rio de Janeiro.