Winner of the Best Actress prize at this year‘s Cannes Film Festival, Linha De Passe - the name, incidentally, of a Brazilian football team - sees Motorcycle Diaries helmer Walter Salles reunited with his Foreign Land co-director Daniela Thomas for another vivid look at working-class life in the vast metropolis of Sao Paolo. Unfolding over a period of four months, its kitchen sink realism is a world away from the kinetic mayhem of City Of Men and Elite Squad. By centering their story around four brothers who seek a way out of the favela without resorting to crime, Salles and Thomas offer a welcome corrective to those movies‘ gun-toting sensationalism.

　　Beginning with a soccer match that reveals the passionate place the sport occupies in the hearts of the city in general and humble cleaner Cleuza (Corveloni) in particular, Linda De Passe follows her back to the cramped apartment she shares with her four sons to show the grim reality of their cash-strapped existence.

　　At 18 years old Dario (De Oliveira from Salles‘ earlier Central Station) harbours increasingly fanciful dreams of being a professional footballer. Denis (Baldasserini) is a motorbike courier who knows that it‘s only a matter of time before he ends up under some careless driver‘s wheels. Dinho (Geraldo Rodrigues) is a devout Christian who begins to question his faith when he loses his job at a gas station. The younger Reginaldo, meanwhile, is so determined to find his bus driver father he spends his days travelling up and down the city‘s clogged highways in the hope of spotting him.
What Salles and Thomas call "the chronic absence of the father in our society" turns out to be a central theme in a lengthy but engrossing saga that shows each of its protagonists reaching some sort of epiphany. For Reginaldo (De Jesus Santos) this turns out to be no more than an act of juvenile rebellion; for Denis, in contrast, it involves a flirtation with criminality that rather goes against the film‘s non-viol