| Behind the Sun (Abril Despedaçado) |
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original film poster |
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| Directed by | Walter Salles |
| Produced by | Arthur Cohn |
| Written by | Ismail Kadare (novel) Karim Ainouz Sérgio Machado Walter Salles João Moreira Salles Daniela Thomas |
| Starring | Rodrigo Santoro José Dumont Rita Assemany Othon Bastos Wagner Moura Vinícius de Oliveira Ravi Ramos Lacerda Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos |
| Music by | Ed Cortês Antonio Pinto Beto Villares |
| Editing by | Isabelle Rathery |
| Distributed by | Buena Vista International Miramax (US) |
| Release date(s) | 12 December 2001 (United States) May 1, 2002 (Brazil) |
| Running time | 105 minutes |
| Country | Brazil |
| Language | Portuguese |
| Budget | $4 million |
Behind the Sun (Portuguese title: Abril Despedaçado) is a 2001 Brazilian film directed by Walter Salles, produced by Arthur Cohn, and starring Rodrigo Santoro. Its original Portuguese title means Shattered April, and it is based on the novel of the same name (original Albanian title: Prill i Thyer) written by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, about the honor culture in the North of Albania.
Contents |
The year is 1910; the place, the badlands of Northeast Brazil. Twenty-year-old Tonho is the middle son of an impoverished farm family, the Breves. He is next in line to kill and then die in an ongoing blood feud with a neighboring clan, the Ferreiras. For generations, the two families have quarreled over land. Now they are locked into a series of tit-for-tat assassinations of their sons; an eye-for-an-eye, a tooth-for-a-tooth. Embedded in this choreography of death is a particular code of ethics: "Blood has the same volume for everyone. You have no right to take more blood than was taken from you." Life is suffused with a sense of futility and stoic despair.
Under pressure from his father, Tonho kills one of the Ferreira sons to avenge the murder of his older brother. This act marks him as the next victim. Tonho's younger brother is addressed only as "the Kid" by the family. Anticipating future loss, his parents don't give him a name. The Kid is an imaginative and loving child, whose spirit will not break in the face of harsh parenting, brutalizing isolation, and numbing poverty. The Kid's love encourages Tonho to question his fate. When Tonho meets Clara, a charming itinerant circus girl, all of life's possibilities open up for him.
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