About Baby
By Ava Cahen
Blown away by this novel of a film, transported by its characters, this contemporary melodrama struck a chord from the first second to the very end.
Marcelo Caetano’s interview
Since my first short films, I've been shooting the old downtown of São Paulo. Once the economical heart of the city, this neighborhood suffered a lot of transformations during the dictatorial regime of the 60-80s. The militaries built viaducts, train lines and tunnels cutting the city center in the middle. This led to the fragmentation of the neighborhood and disintegration of community life. People and jobs had fled for other parts of the town. And these new roads and train lines start to look like SCARS in the city's skin.
People that stayed - or the ones like me that arrived later - found an hostile environment to live in. Baby is a film about these people and their scars. About carrying on us the memories of violence. As São Paulo 's downtown, the characters of Baby struggle against institutional abandonment. They are obliged to make alliances to survive, even if these connections are ephemeral. But for them, loneliness is not a possibility.
Baby is also a film about PASSION. It's a colorful, musical and sensual response to an economical system that wants us aparted and marginalized. Our main characters Baby and Ronaldo are in constant movement, crossing the city, trying to escape from misery. I don't like to think of them as victims, I consider them part of a resistance. They fight against this unfair state of the world by their means. They dance with the city chaos. They find love in a hopeless place. And I do love that their relationship is full of mistakes and desencounters. It's a mirror to the fragmented and contradictory city I film. It's complex and beyond judgment.
