The festival, which opens Wednesday, April 10 with the internationally-acclaimed, award-winning drama, ‘Central Station’, is to be preceded the same afternoon by an official opening ceremony, said Director of the Centre of Brazilian Studies, Mr. Elisio Domingues de Souza.

‘Central Station’, which features veteran character actress Fernanda Montenegro as Dora, and former shoe-shine boy, Vinicius de Oliveira as the 10-year-old orphan, Josue, is about a poor, retired teacher who passes most of the day at a Rio de Janeiro train station writing letters for the illiterate so as to earn her keep.

Among the wily Dora’s trusted clients is Josue’s mother, who enlists the retired teacher’s help in finding the boy’s long-lost drunken father but dies minutes after they were involved in a bus accident. Other members of the cast include Marilia Pera, Soira Lira and Othon Bastos.

According to de Souza, the US$2.9M Walter Salles film saw 73-year-old Montenegro, whose real name is Arlette Pinheiro Esteves da Silva, coming up against the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Meryl Streep and Susan Sarandon for the coveted title of ‘Best Actress’ at the 1998 Academy Awards.

It also won her the title of ‘Best Actress’ at the Berlin Film Festival, and for itself the ‘Silver Bear’ and ‘Golden Globe’ Awards for ‘Best Foreign Language Film’.

Other movies to be featured during the festival include the historical drama, ‘Brave Brazilian People’, which tells of the encounters of Portuguese cartographer, Diogo, with the indigenous peoples of the Brazilian hinterland during his travels there to survey and map the area, and ‘Zero Latitude’, the story of an abandoned, pregnant woman who befriends a fugitive policeman in the northeast of Brazil. The two are to be shown on Thursday, April 11 and Friday April 12 respectively.

A fourth movie, ‘Through the Window’, is billed for Saturday April 13, along with another showing of ‘Central Station’.

‘Through the Window’, which stars Laura Cardoso, Fransergio Araujo, Ana Lucia Torre and Leona Cavali, tells of Selma, a retired middle-class nurse who is obsessed by her handsome son, Raimundo, with whom she lives in a house left them by her late husband. One day Raimundo brings home a friend. From that day on, his attitude towards his mother undergoes a drastic change.

The fifth and final film, an adaptation of 19th Century Brazilian author, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s ‘The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas’, is scheduled for Sunday April 14.

Considered to be one of Brazil’s greatest “but certainly most unconventional” novelists, Machado is said to have deviated considerably from his usual conventional style of writing when penning ‘The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas’, the fifth of his many novels which was published in either 1880 or 1881.

According to the story-line, the central figure, Bras Cubas, who died around 1869, reaches from beyond the grave to narrate his memoirs and to revisit the most outstanding moments of his life. Being frank, he says, is the first virtue of the dead.

With disconcerting sincerity, he is said to guide his audience through his

tumultuous past, remembering with uncanny detail the many incidents and personalities he encountered along the way.

In his quest for love and progeny, he is said to have rejected the women who want him and to aspire to the ones who reject him. Though he dies in the end, unloved and without heirs, yet somehow he manages to turn this bitter pill into a victory of sorts.

In her review for the Christian Science Monitor, writer, Merle Rubin describes the novel as an extraordinary piece of work, and Cubas as “an indolent, well-to-do bachelor”… whom death has enabled to speak freely.

“The spoiled son of a rich, slave-owning family that pretends to have aristocratic

forbears,” she says, “…Cubas dissipates his life in a way not untypical of his class.”

In his youth, she says, he squanders vast sums of money on an avaricious courtesan, and is then persuaded by his father to seek the hand of an attractive, well-connected young lady whose family may help him in his political career.

Writes Rubin: “Virgilia, the lady in question, rejects him in favor of a more appealing suitor. After she has married, however, she and Brás Cubas fall in love and conduct a clandestine affair that generates a certain amount of gossip.

“Looking back on his life from the perspective of the grave, Brás Cubas feels some mild satisfaction in the fact that he has produced no children to suffer life's disappointments - more than a few of which (though he fails to take responsibility for them) - are his own fault.”

Perceiving Machado to be as equally disillusioned as the character, Cubas, she describes him as an ironic, erudite man who is possessed of a deeply skeptical temperament, which allows him to see through the pretensions and self-deceptions of his characters, yet able to satirise their pettiness, even their deceit and cruelty, without becoming rancorous himself.

According to Rubin, Machado was to pen four other novels in the same unorthodox style as ‘The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas’. Among them were ‘Philosopher or Dog’ and ‘Dom Casmurro’, published in 1891 and l900 respectively. (Linda Rutherford)