20,000 Species of Bees

A simple character in a complex world. O Menino e o Mundo (The Boy and the World) follows the gaze of its young protagonist, moving from naive drawings on a white background to extremely elaborate sets evoking distinct realities. The favelas that are home to the men who work in the factories making clothes to be transported from the port in multitudes of containers. With a marabout/make-do effect, this almost wordless film (apart from a few snippets in an imaginary language: backwards Brazilian) jumps from one world to another taking the viewer through as many different styles of drawing as there are types of music present. The breathtaking beauty of the drawings of cotton fields or the night in the favela is transformed at times into a visual symphony, a tribute to Norman McLaren’s technique of painting on film, and at others into a deeply pessimistic ecological fable. (Raphaëlle Pireyre; Critikat)