dir. DANIEL RIBEIRO
Year. 2014
country. Brazil
run-time. 95 mins
rating. 12
£6.00 (£4.50 conc.)
Doors 19:30 - Film 20:00
Our Latin American Cinema Night celebrates Valentines’ Day with:
THE WAY HE LOOKS
Leonardo and Giovana are best friends. Like all teenagers they yearn for more independence and, being blind, Leonardo even more so. They dream of going abroad and of experiencing love’s first kiss. Gabriel, the new boy at school, becomes fast friends with them both, but ultimately three becomes a crowd.
If love happens at first sight, who will Leonardo give his first kiss to?
Told from a unique perspective, The Way He Looks is a universal story of first love that redefined the genre and captured the adoration of cinema audiences the world over.
Directors Statement
THE WAY HE LOOKS is a film focusing on the awakening of the sexuality of a blind teenager. Adolescence is a period in one’s life filled with so many discoveries and sexuality is usually associated with the sense of sight. So how does someone who doesn’t see, finds him or herself attracted to another person? More than that, how does a person that has never seen a man or woman defines their sexual orientation? That’s what we find out when we’re introduced to Leonardo’s life. Besides being blind, there’s one other peculiarity about our main character: he’s gay. Both blindness and homosexuality are still taboos and objects of prejudice in society.
In films, when homosexuality is not a problem in terms of stereotypical character building, many times it is put as an obstacle in the plot, which means that it is necessary to overcome prejudice or prove to society, friends and family that being gay is “normal”. THE WAY HE LOOKS portrays homosexuality, but not as a central theme. The movie is about a teenager boy discovering his sexuality but it does not focus on his sexual orientation. No doubt Leonardo being gay is a major aspect, but less important than experiencing his first love, his first desires and all new experiences brought by adolescence. I wanted to create a universal story that, gay or straight, blind or not, everyone would be able to relate to what Leonardo goes through.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
“The film offers something much deeper, and what is not said makes it refreshing, and beautiful”
“Brazilian writer-director Daniel Ribeiro displays an assured sense of tone in this debut feature, sustaining an air of fragile beauty but never once slipping into preciousness”
“Admirable throughout is the balance that Ribeiro strikes between dewy eroticism and the contextualization of sexuality as just a single aspect of one’s identity, albeit an essential one.”