Rating: 
Summary: nicely done with a no-big-deal story
Review: again, brazil looks so pathetic like watching 'central station'. this is a sad story of struggled lives. seems dealing with the tough life is still not enough, and still want to kill others to get some fun. a well performed film, casting, directing, acting...all good, but still, a kinda boring movie like the lives portrayed in this movie.
Rating: 
Summary: The best camera shots ever!!!
Review: As all movies from Walter Salles this one is great. What makes this one even better than his previous ones is the camera. You can hit pause anytime and you will see a great picture.
The movie shows a part of Brazil, the Sertão, which is completely unknown to most people, but has its own beauty.
The actors a re unknown ones, but they are great.If you are interested in movies which are not typically (stupid) Hollywood you should definetly get it!
Great!!!
Rating:
Summary: Suffering and sadness lie Behind the Sun.
Review: Behind the Sun takes place in 1910 in the Brazilian countryside. Even so, the movie has a timeless feel to it. Two families have a long standing feud and the film very early on shows us a dream sequence with the oldest son of the Breves family being ambushed and shot while carrying his youngest brother, "kid," on his shoulders across an open field. The shirt of the victim is hung on a clothesline. When the blood turns yellow, Tonio, the son next in line, will be required to ambush and kill the member of the rival Ferreira family who murdered his brother. Tonio carries out his assignment, kills his rival, and the stage is now set for the process to be repeated, seemingly in an endless cycle which will ultimately destroy both families. Unfortunately, a misguided sense of honor has blinded both families to the stupidity and senselessness of the feud. Only the youngest brother of the Breves family, the kid, seems immune to the craziness of the longstanding feud. He is a dreamer and we see him pouring over a book about the ocean given to him by circus performers who are on their way to the next town to set up their tent. The fire-eater in the circus is a beautiful young woman and the kid's older brother Tonio falls in love with her at first sight. This complicates matters because Tonio knows that he doesn't have much longer to live. The rival family will kill him when the blood on the shirt of the man Tonio killed turns yellow. Except for brief moments at the circus, we experience the suffering of a family that has lost much and appears destined to lose even more. The Breves family has no hope and no future because tradition and honor are more powerful than reason. We don't have to look far to see counterparts everywhere today -- Northern Ireland, Palestine, Bosnia, etc. The climax of the film is heartbreakingly sad -- no Hollywood ending here. The kid loves his brother Tonio and wants him to be happy. He is a dreamer and he is willing to pay the price to make his dreams come true. His dreams and sacrifice are a means of liberation for his brother and his family and an example for all of us. We will not soon forget him.
Rating:
Summary: Suffering and sadness lie Behind the Sun.
Review: Behind the Sun takes place in 1910 in the Brazilian countryside. Even so, the movie has a timeless feel to it. Two families have a long standing feud and the film very early on shows us a dream sequence with the oldest son of the Breves family being ambushed and shot while carrying his youngest brother, "kid," on his shoulders across an open field. The shirt of the victim is hung on a clothesline. When the blood turns yellow, Tonio, the son next in line, will be required to ambush and kill the member of the rival Ferreira family who murdered his brother. Tonio carries out his assignment, kills his rival, and the stage is now set for the process to be repeated, seemingly in an endless cycle which will ultimately destroy both families. Unfortunately, a misguided sense of honor has blinded both families to the stupidity and senselessness of the feud. Only the youngest brother of the Breves family, the kid, seems immune to the craziness of the longstanding feud. He is a dreamer and we see him pouring over a book about the ocean given to him by circus performers who are on their way to the next town to set up their tent. The fire-eater in the circus is a beautiful young woman and the kid's older brother Tonio falls in love with her at first sight. This complicates matters because Tonio knows that he doesn't have much longer to live. The rival family will kill him when the blood on the shirt of the man Tonio killed turns yellow. Except for brief moments at the circus, we experience the suffering of a family that has lost much and appears destined to lose even more. The Breves family has no hope and no future because tradition and honor are more powerful than reason. We don't have to look far to see counterparts everywhere today -- Northern Ireland, Palestine, Bosnia, etc. The climax of the film is heartbreakingly sad -- no Hollywood ending here. The kid loves his brother Tonio and wants him to be happy. He is a dreamer and he is willing to pay the price to make his dreams come true. His dreams and sacrifice are a means of liberation for his brother and his family and an example for all of us. We will not soon forget him.
Rating:
Summary: A bleak story told in an austere place
Review: BEHIND THE SUN, with English subtitles for Portuguese dialogue, is a Brazilian version of the Hatfield-McCoy feud and set in 1910. The Breves family - husband, wife, and two sons - are hardscrabble sugar cane farmers. We don't really know what the Ferreira family does - perhaps they're ranchers. Both clans have waged a blood feud for generations over a wretched piece of land better bulldozed flat for a shopping mall. Considering the endless cycle of an eye for an eye, will Tonio, the oldest Breves son, live long enough to venture beyond his family's land and experience love before the bloodstains on that Ferreira shirt turn from red to yellow in the wind and sun? BEHIND THE SUN showcases actors that Americans have likely never seen before (and may never see again), but they're all excellent: José Dumont as Tonio's father, Rita Assemany as his mother, Ravi Lacerda as his young brother ("The Kid"), Flavia Antonio as bewitching Clara of the traveling carnival, and Rodrigo Santoro as Tonio himself. Filmed in color, the movie depicts a physical landscape of magnificent austerity. Had it been in black and white, it would have been almost brutal. The film's thematic message, I think, is that embedded tribal conflicts based on ethnicity or religion or, in this case, some overblown concept of "honor", are almost impossible to resolve rationally and peacefully. And the film goes on to ask - and answer, in this particular storyline - the question of what must happen before the killing is to stop. My mild disenchantment with the theme of BEHIND THE SUN is the suspicion that it's been done previously many more times than I realize, most recently to my knowledge in the excellent film NO MAN'S LAND, which deals with a more contemporary antagonism. Moreover, the script reduces the problem of tribal conflict to the simplest scenario possible and thus oversimplifies the issue beyond everyday realities. However, in that it strips the issue down to the bone, so to speak, it does manage to admirably clarify the stupidity and tragedy of such discord. BEHIND THE SUN is a film to be admired, but not one to be seen for light entertainment.
Rating: 
Summary: I want to love it...
Review: But alas, I only like it. Firstly, let me say that this film is absolutely gorgeous- quite honestly frame for frame one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen. Visually stunning, I felt like pausing and just staring at the palette of colors, the scenery, and the beautiful people- and that this reaction may be a problem. I can't help feeling that the story, a simple revenge fable, should have been stronger, or the scenes stronger. Alas, in the end, it was prettier than it was deep. It's meant to be like a short poem, able to give a handful of emotions. Instead it plays about like a small story in really neat handwriting, on very fine perfumed paper. As a dvd, well, its typical for Miramax. The film is there, nothing else.
Rating:
Summary: "Mostly Beautiful"
Review: Set among feuding sugarcane farmers in rural Brazil at the start of the last century, this film is in most respects a consistently beautiful achievement. First of all, the spectacular photography, as astonishing on DVD as in the theater, is marked by a series of wonderfully lit or darkened barren and lush vistas of the sort which linger in the memory. The acting, too, is noteworthy for the naturalness of most of the players, the older of whom have faces rightly savaged by the harshness of the vengeance code they uphold and the narrow meanness of their lives of quiet desperation. The younger people in the film, eager for a life of more promise and joy than that offered by the declining sugar cane trade or itinerant circus performing, are to a person physically beautiful, yet frail and vulnerable to abuse, even early death, given the limited options their lives actually afford them.
On the other hand, the film ,in my view, has a serious flaw, which is its dependence on the stereotypical character of the wise, unbelievably insightful pre-pubescent child not only to voice obvious truths none of the grown-ups see as quickly but also to provide the entirely predictable, essentially sentimental denouement. With such astonishingly fresh realism marking the treatment of economic competition (i.e. the scene of price gouging at the sugar trading office) and family feuding (the appearance of the killer among the mourners at his victim's funeral) in the early and central parts of the film, the use of such a Hollywood or T.V.-style wise kid is both jarring and disappointing.
Rating:
Summary: awesome
Review: simply beatiful and wonderful. i wish all the movies were like this one. it is not complicated, it is not hollywood, different characters, no tom cruise or bradd pit... you will be mesmerized.....believe me. - otoniel
Rating:
Summary: Feuding Families, Brazil, 1910. Strong, Not a False Note
Review: Striking images all around, 'Behind the Sun' shows how a good picture can let you smell the air of the place, the breath of the people. Walter Salles ('Central Station' 'The Motorcycle Diaries') tells a story that resembles Greek dramas, with its simplicity and strength, but it is the picture's sheer beautiful visuals that makes 'Behind the Sun' a boon to every filmgoer. In short, watch this.
It's in 1910, in Brazil, in the middle of nowhere. Two families are feuding with each other, according to their peculiar rules. If one goes down, another member of the family revenges his death by killing the killer only. Thus the life goes on.
Among one of the family, we see the brothers -- younger Paku and elder Tonio. They work hard to make sugar, using the old machine and two cows, with their silent sad-eyed mother and very strict father. And the day finally comes when Tonio is ordered to kill: the spilled blood has turned yellow.
The bloody cycle of death is briefly disturbed when a beautiful circus girl comes to the near town. Or is it to be disturbed? Will Tonio choose another way of life? And what does Paku do?
You may say the plot is melodramatic. It is, sure, but the power of the story cannot be dismissed so easily. Walter Salles succeeds in creating the atmosphere of the place, and despair and hope of the characters as well, all of which are so compelling.
Also helped by the good acting from Rodrigo Santoro (in 'Love Actually' as Laura Linney's love), the film is about those characters and images. like 'Central Station.' For all its slightly conventional storytelling (and very powerful one), 'Behind the Sun' remains a gripping experience all throughout.
The story is inspired by a novel 'Broken April' written by Ismail Kadare. The film changed the original's location (in Alvania) to Brazil, and was shot in the really desert places where the sun scorches from the deep blue sky onto the red rocks. (It is said that the cast and crew had to travel from the nearest hotel to the location more than 200 km. everyday.) And see Vinicius de Oliveira, as the family member rivalling Tonio's, who was the little boy in 'Central Station'
Rating:
Summary: A darkly brooding vision of the timelessness of vengeance
Review: The story in this film is simple: blood for blood feuding between two families in the backlands of Brazil. If left at that, this would be a conceptually boring movie, one done hundreds of times in various locations for varying Hollywood budgets. The glory of BEHIND THE SUN is in the presentation and transformation of a familiar precis into a visually stunning prolonged motion painting. Director Salles has assembled a cast of beautiful actors, minimized the Portuguese dialog so that the visuals may convey the text almost solo, and has added appropriations from other art forms to make this a memorable film. The only characters outside the feuding families are a traveling troupe of 'clowns' or a circus consisting of an older man and his senusously beautiful stepdaughter. This nod to the "I PAGLIACCI" opera invests intrigue and introduces the concept of the redeeming force of love into this otherwise blighted life story of a young man doomed to die for family honor. The photography is elegant, the acting is superb, the musical scoring is sensitively appropriate without drawing attention to itself. This is a very beautiful, very fine film.
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