Midnight

Meia Noite

The Brazilian Walter Salles has earned international respect for the hard-won emotional power of his marvellous Central Station. With Midnight, Brazil’s millenium entry, he and longtime collaborator Daniela Thomas have created an electrifying, impassioned vision of a city where life is cheap but where hope may still stir the hardest heart. Consummately cinematic and almost unbearably suspenseful in its thriller plot, Midnight is as alarming and as ecstatic as you might expect New Year’s Eve in Rio to be. — Bill Gosden

Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas have created a haunting, romantic and exhilarating film which speaks to our increasing isolation as human beings with a fierce clarity and rich intensity.

A young man who refuses to spend the end of the century locked away in prison must murder his best friend to earn his freedom. A young speech therapist suddenly left alone by the man she loved contemplates suicide. They find one another on the roof of a building overlooking Copacabana beach…

Salles is the most important talent to emerge from South America in years...and his characteristically breathtaking cinematic tableaux are presented here in their awesome splendour. Through the visceral, painful moral choices faced by their characters in the wild atmosphere of mountainous favelas and rich, beach-side condominiums, Salles and Thomas have found a new way to express the passionate humanism which was the hallmark of the Brazilian cinema of the 60s. Yet, with an intense clarity, they see that the promise of the past has succumbed to human frailty and corruption; until this failure is examined, the future will hold nothing new for their cherished nation. — Ramiro Puerta, Toronto Film Festival, 1999