Guy Lodge Film CriticIt’s become commonly recognized as critical hackwork to observe that a city acts as a character in a film, for the good reason that it’s almost never true.
When sensuously and specifically captured on screen, however, a city can shape and alter the characters it contains. The ragged modernist maze of São Paulo serves exactly this purpose in “Shine Your Eyes,” a heady, enveloping narrative debut from Brazilian docmaker Matias Mariani: It’s shown as a place where immigrants come to lose themselves and find themselves in one fell swoop, planting new roots in its geometric concrete cracks.
Ostensibly a missing-person drama, following a Nigerian visitor’s winding search for his estranged older brother, “Shine Your Eyes”.
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