Hoje Eu Quero Voltar Sozinho [literally: Today I Want to Go Home Alone/On My Own]
Director: Daniel Ribeiro
Writer: Daniel Ribeiro
Cast: Ghilherme Lobo, Fabio Audi, Tess Amorim, Lúcia Romano, Eucir de Souza, Selma Egrei, Isabela Guasco, Victor Filgueiras
Part of: identities Festival
Seen on: 12.6.2015

Plot:
Leonardo (Ghilherme Lobo) is in high school with his best friend Giovana (Tess Amorim). They have their established patterns with each other that are designed to support Leonardo – he is blind. But when a new student, Gabriel (Fabio Audi), comes to their school, he shakes things up, not only in the school itself, but especially in Leonardo whose world suddenly feels way too small.

Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho was a sweet coming of age film that had me practically skipping out of the cinema, that’s how happy it made me.

Ribeiro really captures adolescence in his characters, both in the script and how he brings them to the screen. At least I felt compeltely reminded of my own teenage years (which is only partly related that I spent a year of them in Brazil): the confusion and the drama, the perceived wisdom and the difficulties in the relationships, the enthusiasm and the cruetly – it was all there and sometimes you had to smile at all that youth, but mostly you just felt yourself thrown back into it.

And in all of that adolescence you have Leonardo who fights for his right to live his own life. Despite being a teenager. Despite being blind. He wants out of his routine and the safety of it, he’s looking for adventure and for freedom. He wants to go abroad as an exchange student. He wants to be home alone, without his mother. And it was a beautiful thing that that quest for self-determination was the major conflict of the film. Not the fact that he falls in love with a boy, and not that he is blind or only insofar as it makes his environment even more concerned for him; no, his fight for the right to make his own decisions and be his own person.

Of course, no film is perfect and HEQVS does have its drawbacks: one was that they didn’t actually cast a blind boy for the film (even though Ghilherme Lobo plays the part wonderfully, it just seems a missed opportunity). And the other was that there is one girl in the film, Karina (Isabela Guasco) who is constantly slutshamed. Fortunately she doesn’t feature a lot, or it would have drove me insane that her friendliness and flirtatiousness is constantly seen as a moral failure.

But apart from those two things, I absolutely adored HEQVS, right down to its unrealistic and perfectly happy ending – which was the reason for my grin from ear to ear as I left the cinema.

Summarizing: Adorable.