B razilian film-maker Walter Salles had a huge breakthrough success with this big-hearted road movie in 1998. It is a prize-garlanded and Oscar-nominated film that made a serious player of its director and an international name for its then 69-year-old female lead, Brazilian stage and screen star Fernanda Montenegro. She plays a querulous woman called Dora who finds herself travelling across the country, on the edge of poverty and almost on the run, from Rio to the Sertão in Brazil’s remote north-east, in the company of a bewildered, angry, vulnerable little orphan boy whose life she has just (unwillingly) saved.

It’s an often unashamedly sentimental movie about redemption in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin and Vittorio De Sica. An ingenious, if glib, final twist gives the tale its so

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