The Year My Parents Went on Vacation

Cao Hamburger's The Year My Parents Went on Vacation is a warm and wonderful film from Brazil. The year is 1970. Young Mauro (Michel Joelsas) loves soccer and is obsessed with the World Cup (just like everyone else in Brazil). But Mauro's life is going to be turned upside down because his parents are going away on "vacation" and leaving him with his grandfather (his father's father). However, his parents are really going into hiding because they oppose the military dictatorship and are being hounded by the authorities. They drop him off by his grandfather's house but grandpa never shows up. It turns out that he died of a heart attack a few hours ago.

So what will happen to poor Mauro? The Jewish community of Bom Retiro in Sao Paul take him in. His grandfather's neighbor Shlomo (Germano Haiut) is his main caretaker. Eventually Mauro makes friends with some of the children in the neighborhood. And there is the World Cup. When that is going on we see Orthodox Jews, students against the dictatorship, Italians and everyone else rooting for Brazil to win. But even all of this excitement can't take Mauro's mind off of his parents.

The film is mainly in Portuguese but there is also a good amount of Yiddish throughout. I don't want to say more about the plot because I don't want to spoil things. I will say that although Mauro's father is Jewish his mother is not so he 8is not considered to be a Jew. But that doesn't matter because this loving community takes him under their wings. This film has a small distributor so it may not be easy to find. I highly recommend it but if you can't see on the big screen then by all means rent it when it comes out on DVD. You will not be sorry that you did.