Director Walter Salles ("The Motorcycle Diaries) and his co-directer Daniela Thomas return to the streets of Brazil for their competition entry at Cannes, "Linha de Passe." In realist style, the story follows four brothers in modern San Paulo as they learn how to cope with poverty and daily life in the director's hometown. 

"Linha de Passe" (a soccer term) chronicles one summer in the lives of pregnant housemaid Cleuza (Sandra Corveloni) and her four sons. Dario (Vinicius De Oliveira) is a talented soccer player who wants to go pro, Dinho (José Geraldo Rodrigues) is a motorcycle courier on the dangerous highways of San Paulo with a baby by a previous girlfriend, Denis (Joao Baldasserini) is a born-again Christian looking for some sort of salvation, and young Reginaldo (Kaique de Jesus Santos) rides the city bus all day and night searching for his unknown father. 

With "Linha de Passe," Salles wanted to break away from the typical stories of drugs and crime in Brazil and instead focus on the kids who live there and manage to save themselves. Drugs and crime are not absent from the film, but the actions are shown as pieces of these boys' lives and part of reality in the outskirts of the large Brazilian city. 

Thus, Salles provides viewers with a wandering plot that does not possess much structure. This is an exercise in cinema du realité: since when does real life have a three-act structure? The final sequence shows all four brothers being tested; Salles intercuts between all of the stories, raising the tension and cementing our emotional connection to the boys. The ending is open and left up to interpretation, but that does not mean it is not satisfying. 

Salles uses newcomers to the screen and unknown actors here, allowing the performances to be as close to real as possible. These four boys maintain individuality even as the camera flits from one story to another, following the characters as they go through daily life confronting sex, work, drugs, crime, unknown fathers, and, most dramatic of all, soccer tryouts. This family has no father, but these boys show that their relationship can lead to the salvation they seek.