Arts & Entertainment

Short-listed as an mar nominee, film about a yodn
mysteriously disappear depicts Jewish lta

Mauro (Michel Joelsas), center, suddenly finds himself an exile in his own country and is forced to create an ersatz family from the religiously diverse and colorful
population of his new neighborhood in the Brazilian film The Year My Parents Went on Vacation.

Michael Fox
Special to the Jewish News

C

ao Hamburger always knew about
his grandparents' pioneering work
in Sao Paolo's Jewish community.
The Brazilian filmmaker has now made his
own substantial contribution — with a pen
and a camera.
The Year My Parents Went on Vacation,
set during the dictatorship and amid the
frenzy of the 1970 World Cup, is a bitter-
sweet story of a 12-year-old boy at loose
ends after his political parents go into
hiding.
Left on the stoop of his Jewish grandfa-
ther's apartment building and soon handed
a sad surprise, Mauro comes to rely on the
kindness of the strangers in the mixed but
mostly Jewish Sao Paolo neighborhood.
"I think this film was my late bar mitz-
vah, somehow," Hamburger says. "I always
had contact with the culture, but making
this film I could [better] investigate and
understand this part of my roote
The Year My Parents Went on Vacation
made the short-list of 15 titles for the
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language
Film. The movie opens Friday, April 11,
at the Landmark Maple Art Theatre in
Bloomfield Township and Friday, April 25,

at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor.
The film began to sprout in Hamburger's
head several years ago when he was work-
ing in London.
"I was alone; my family wasn't with me,
and I was in this exile situation," the tall,
45-year-old director recalls during a recent
interview.
"Alone in a different country, with differ-
ent people, and realizing how, actually, I like
to be the foreign guy — you see a different
way; your sight is more accurate. You feel
more sensitive somehow. I don't know why,
but I was very interested in understanding
my roots:'
Hamburger's grandparents emigrated
from Germany in 1936, when his father was
2 years old. His grandmother co-founded
a huge orphanage for Jewish children in
Sao Paolo that's still in existence (although
now it's dedicated to poor children), and
his grandfather co-founded a major Jewish
community center.
"My father was raised as a Jewish guy,
but he turned out to be a scientist first of
all," Hamburger says with a smile, turning
to a translator to clarify a word. "They have
their own God."
His father and his mother, a Catholic, met
at university, and both became physicists.
Hamburger's awareness of Jewish culture,

Director Cao Hamburger, center: "I
think this film was my late bar mitzvah,
somehow."

in other words, came from his grand-
mother.
But this was decades ago. So Hamburger
spent three years researching the Jewish
community of Sao Paolo and Jewish cul-
ture. He took a Kabbalah course and he
read countless works of literature. He cites
Amos Oz's Israel-set memoir, A Tale of Love
and Darkness, as a key work in the process
of making the film.
Then Hamburger brought in a Jewish
writing partner who grew up in the neigh-
borhood where The Year My Parents Went
on Vacation takes place. The director cast
all the children, as well as the neighbors
in Mauro's building, from the local Jewish
community.
For the key role of Shlomo, a religious

Jew in his 70s who lives next door to
Mauro's grandfather and has no clue how to
connect with an adolescent boy, Hamburger
went further afield — all the way to Recife,
the site of the first Jewish synagogue built
in the Americas and the birthplace of the
first Jews to settle in New Amsterdam.
There he found Germano Haiut, a suc-
cessful owner of several clothing shops, a
leader of the Jewish community and a gre-
garious fellow with half-a-dozen grandchil-
dren. So Haiut would understand how to be
alone, Hamburger got him to agree to live
by himself in an apartment in Sao Paolo for
40 days during rehearsal and production.
The Year My Parents Went on Vacation
was a success in Brazil, Hamburger reports.
But that was almost a bonus.
"I think [making the film] really was my
rite of passage," he confides. "Something
changed inside me about understanding
Jewish community" ❑

The Year My Parents Went on
Vacation is scheduled to open Friday,
April 11, at the Landmark Maple Art
Theatre in Bloomfield Township.
(248) 263-2111. It will open Friday,
April 25, at the Michigan Theater in
Ann Arbor.

April 3 • 2008

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