Central Station

Dora, a cynical retired teacher, makes a living writing letters for illiterate travellers at a Rio railway station. After a boy named Josue is orphaned, she reluctantly takes him on a journey across Brazil in search of the father he has never known, and the two are slowly changed by each other.

The film moves from cynicism to surrogate motherhood, tracing mourning, repair and the capacity to care that a child can awaken in an adult. It offers a clinician a study of found attachment and of grief worked through in relationship. It won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 1998.