Central Station

Central Station (Central do Brasil, 1998) is Walter Salles' Brazilian drama, available to watch online on iFILM. At Rio de Janeiro's main railway terminal, a jaded former teacher named Dora charges a dollar to write letters for people who can't read — and quietly never mails some of them.

Among her customers are nine-year-old Josué and his mother, sending word to the father the boy has never met. When the mother is killed by a bus, the child is left alone in a vast, indifferent city. Dora's first instinct is to sell him; her second, slower one is to put him on a bus and head across the parched Brazilian northeast to find his father. Two strangers, stuck with each other, with nowhere else to turn. Fernanda Montenegro and first-time actor Vinícius de Oliveira carry the whole thing between them.

Salles shot in real stations and along the dirt roads of the sertão, letting the country bleed into the story. The film took the Golden Bear at Berlin, and Montenegro went on to a Best Actress nod at the Oscars. A quiet, unsentimental story about how a stranger turns into someone you can't leave behind. Stream Central Station online on iFILM.