Napo
2020 · 17m · Brasil
Directed by Gustavo Ribeiro
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, family
Tones: melancholic, tender, whimsical
Our life is the result of the moments we remember — but what if we could not remember anything? Through a child's playful vision, the building of a friendship between grandson and grandfather: in his grandfather, Juan finds great company to share his greatest passion, drawing, and with his grandson's relationship, Napo has the opportunity to remember fragments of past memories for the last time.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's going to applaud the grandfather-grandson memory thing, but Napo actually subverts the sentimental family drama by letting the child's drawing literally *become* the grammar of how we see loss — it's whimsy doing the work grief usually monopolizes.
Ribeiro situates this comfortably in the lineage of poetic memory cinema (Koreeda's influence is audible), but the formal restraint—letting the drawings breathe rather than overdetermined montage—shows a curator's hand aware of what *not* to underline.
The decision to filter entire sequences through the grandson's drawings instead of cutting between realism and abstraction—that single formal choice transforms what could be maudlin into something genuinely about how a child's perception *reshapes* what we're allowed to mourn.