Visiones Latinas: Filmfest München 2011 (selection + wonderful piece of writing)

A transvestite who works as a prostitute and a professor for gender studies devotes her free time to writing historical romances. A Hare-Krishna disciple, who, after his day job at a call center, turns into a screaming soccer fan. Two protagonists in the debut film of Brazilian Sérgio Borges. Given such bizarre characters one might be tempted to accuse this young filmmaker of having a wild imagination. But nothing could be further from reality. All of the characters really exist. They play themselves and take this theatrical film to the outer limits of documentary films. And to the perimeters of the metaphysical. The title is O CÉU SOBRE OS OMBROS (THE SKY ABOVE – literally, The Sky On Their Shoulders). What remains unclear is just who the title refers to: the protagonists and their burdensome search for identity and transcendence – or the cinema itself, as an allegory of Atlas attempting to