Central Station

Central Station is a 1998 Brazilian road drama film directed by Walter Salles and starring Fernanda Montenegro, Marília Pêra and Vinícius de Oliveira. The screenplay, adapted by João Emanuel Carneiro and Marcos Bernstein from a story by its director Walter Salles, tells the story of a young boy's friendship with a jaded middle-aged woman. Montenegro's performance earned her international critical acclaim and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress (becoming the first and to date only Brazilian and Latin American actress to ever be nominated in the lead actress category), while the film received a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Plot Dora is a retired schoolteacher who works at Rio de Janeiro's Central Station writing letters for illiterate customers for living. Embittered by life, she usually shows a lack of patience with customers and sometimes does not mail the letters that she writes, putting them in a drawer or even tearing them up instead. One of her customers is the mother of Josué, a poor 9-year-old boy who hopes to meet his unknown father someday. When she is killed in a bus accident just outside the train station and Josué is left homeless, Dora is forced to take him in; she initially traffics him to a corrupt couple, but later steals him back out of guilt. Dora is initially reluctant to be responsible for the boy, but eventually decides to take a trip with him to Northeast Brazil in order to find his father.