Casa Grande
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This compassionate, long-awaited fiction debut from Fellipe Barbosa follows a teenage boy living in Rio as he challenges parental expectations, fights to get into university and discovers an unexpected family financial crisis. A tender coming of age story, Barbosa’s Casa Grande is a gorgeously written exploration of class differences and racism in modern-day Brazil.

El compasivo y muy esperado debut en la ficción de Fellipe Barbosa sigue las peripecias de un adolescente en Río que, desafiando los deseos de sus padres, lucha por entrar a la universidad y descubre la inesperada crisis financiera de la familia. CASA GRANDE, esta tierna y brillantemente escrita historia de iniciación a la vida adulta, es también una exploración de las diferencias de clase y del racismo en el Brasil actual.

Director's Statement

Casa Grande, or The Ballad of Poor Jean is my first narrative feature. It’s an extremely personal film, since it portrays the world in which I grew up and from which I tried to escape. My main intention was to tell a great story, focusing on characters and their relationships, set in a very specific and authentic universe. I worked with non-professional teenage actors alongside soap opera stars, whose image connects with the characters in the film. Besides the naturalism in the performances, I strived for a formal rigor, through the repetition of familiar shots, which gradually narrate the transformation of the big house. The project went through the Sundance screenwriters and directors lab in 2008, where it won the Annenberg Foundation Grant, and was a finalist of the NHK award.