Not sure in which part of the extense Marginal Tietê the film was shot and covered with great detail in a long one-shot sequence that lasts unil its arrival on a
certain neighborhood - the express way covers a great deal of the city of São Paulo, in several extremes. While the first half of the short consists of this long sequence,
slightly uninteresting just because of the ugliness of the city filmed up until the houses start to appear, the other half is the one that keeps us shocked, sad and
thinking of several things at the same time because it shows an area surrounding the highway where there's nothing but misery and poverty, expressed here by a group
of kids observing the camera and living their lives in a devastating manner in the middle of tiny shackles and plenty of garbage in the surroundings.
Progress certainly can cross bridges and unite the extremes of the city but zero assistance or the developments of housing in such areas existed back in the 1970's
and onwards. As for the future, or then present, who can tell what happened to those areas if it was taken over to give space to acomodations to the poor or became an area
habitated by companies, businesses or housing for people with acquisitions. All we know is that Marginal Tietê managed to expand all the way to similar areas where people
had nothing (school, hospitals, assistance) yet it was the little they had to inhabit there.
While most of its images are shown in a silent manner, it's way later on that Mozart's sad requiem "Lacrimosa" dominates everything and the deep thinking and
analysis of everything shown comes back to haunt us. Another great examples of how the cinema of Aloysio Raulino captures the dimensions of a gigantic city and its
social economical contradictions where those who have and those who have not are united by narrow divisions which collapses in itself time and again. That was then, one
can say but it is still now, it changed just a little bit. 6/10.
