A Brazilian education

'The Year My Parents Went on Vacation'

A little boy whom a fickle fate has cast into the care of a grouchy, religiously devout Jewish man finds himself locked out of the bathroom and needing to pee into the houseplant in a new drama/comedy set at the onset of the turbulent 1970s. Mauro's indiscretion exposes him to scrutiny over a far more grievous divide from his host Shlomo's point of view: between cut and uncut.

In The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, we follow the adult world through the eyes of a soccer-obsessed lad on the cusp of puberty. This 12-year-old boy (Michel Joelsas) is left behind when his Socialist parents flee Brazil's military dictatorship. Mauro waits outside the door of his elderly grandfather, a Holocaust survivor who, unbeknownst to his family, has died in his one-chair barbershop. Mauro is adopted by Sao Paulo's small community of elderly Jews. A Polish refugee, Shlomo (the late Germano Haiut, one of his country's leading actors, in a sublime swan song) blunders into surrogate parenthood by offending the boy with ghastly food, cold showers and a propensity for looking for gaffes in one's religious observance. Mauro's is his failure to be circumcised.

A young female friend introduces the boy to coming attractions when she guides him and other neighborhood lads to furtive peepholes carved into the ladies' dressing room of her parents' clothing store. Mauro learns to integrate himself into a neighborhood where Brazil's soccer fate is considered as dear as life itself. Photographed in a rich sepia tone that celebrates childhood memory, Cao Hamburger's haunting fable was strong enough to hold its audience after a PG&E crew cut off juice to the Castro Theatre during the recent Latino Film Festival.

In person, Hamburger is a charming man whose film contains an optimistic view of a nation still struggling with dire poverty and the highest drug-fueled homicide rate in the Western Hemisphere.

Cao Hamburger: Do you know Carl Jung?

David Lamble: You mean Jungian archetypes?

Exactly. We have a stronger archetype of a mother nation: we have good music, good weather, beautiful beaches, beautiful nature — it's a very warm mother. But the father side of our country is weak because we have dictatorship, corruption and social problems. We are orphans when it comes to fathers.

I loved the kids peeping into the ladies' dressing room.

The film is about putting your foot into the adult world. That scene is part of my co-writer's (Claudio Galperin) experience because he was raised in this [garment district] neighborhood. But is there anyone who has grown up and never peeped?

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