Pixote, A Lei do Mais Fraco

Between Fact and Fiction

Alejandro Reyes-Arias

University of California, Berkeley

2006
 It is impossible, when thinking about Pixote: a lei do mais fraco, not to wonder about the uncanny
coincidence between fiction and fact, between art and reality. And it is difficult, when writing about
the film, to decide whether to start by talking about Pixote or about Fernando Ramos da Silva.
Fernando’s murder by the military police seven years after the release of the film where he starred as
Pixote, and the tumultuous intervening years when prejudice, stigma, discrimination, and a myriad of
factors associated to his poor and marginalized background seemed to conspire against him as in a
classical tragedy, reproduced like a theater screen the images of a corrupt and profoundly ill social
system projected by Hector Babenco’s film. His inability to escape a life of poverty, marginality, and
violence despite his brief success as an actor mimicked the hopelessness of the children depicted in
Pixote. And his murder seemed like the brutal and much cruder ending of an unfinished script, as if
ten-year-old Pixote’s glue-induced hallucination, where he runs naked down a dark street fleeing from
the police who are trying to murder him, had been finally accomplished in the body of the actor
himself, seven years later. Fact or fiction, art or life, documentary or imaginative creation, romance or
reportagem. The genres seem to have gotten disoriented, their boundaries blurred.
Pixote was inspired in José Louzeiro’s A infância dos mortos, a “documentary novel” or romance-
reportagem, a genre that became popular in Brazil during the military dictatorship. In fact, as Randal
Johnson points out, Brazil’s romance-reportagem has certain specificities that are lost in the term
“documentary novel”: reportagem means not only the act of journalistic reporting but also a newspaper
report. The genre was a response by journalists to the violent censorship established by the
dictatorship after 1968 through the infamous Ato Institucional 5 (AI5). By blurring the lines between
literature and journalism, it was possible to deal with topics that would have otherwise been censured
(Johnson 37). Although Infância dos mortos was written in 1977, during the period of the so-called
abertura—the gradual softening of the dictatorship—it was still impossible to talk about police and
military repression openly. The book was motivated by the Camanducaia incident, in which close to
100 children were rounded up in the streets of downtown São Paulo, packed into a bus, and driven to
the outskirts of the town of Camanducaia, in the state of Minas Gerais, where they were brutalized,
tortured, and literally dumped over a cliff. José Louzeiro, who was then working for the newspaper
Folha de São Paulo, went to Camanducaia and in the police station found 52 mostly naked and severely
beaten children and teenagers. Among them was Dito, who recounted a horrific story of terror and
murder. Some 40 children were never heard of again. José Louzeiro’s eight-page report was cut down
to 60 lines and purged of any compromising language by the newspaper censors. A few years later, he
wrote Infância dos mortos, which combined a fictionalized account of that event with previous
experiences with children in the streets of São Paulo and in his native Camboa do Mato, a poor
neighborhood in the periphery of São Luís do Maranhão (Louzeiro 1993).
Some time after the publication of Infância dos mortos, Hector Babenco attempted to film a
documentary about the FEBEMs (Fundação Estadual do Bem-Estar do Menor), the correctional
institutions for “minors” established during the dictatorship, but was forbidden by the government
censors. He then bought the rights to Infância dos mortos and, together with Jorge Durán, created the
screenplay for Pixote, inspired in Louzeiro’s novel but differing significantly from it. The version of
Pixote released in the United States begins in documentary style with Hector Babenco, dressed in white
and holding a folder in his hand, speaking in front of a favela. “This is a district of São Paulo, a large
Latin American industrial city,” he says, “responsible for 60 to 70% of this country’s gross national
product.” He then goes on to provide a number of statistics about poverty and the situation of

2
children in Brazil while the camera zooms in on the favela and shows various shots of children and
teenagers, until it stops at a close-up of Fernando da Silva and his family. “Fernando, who plays the
main character of Pixote,” says Babenco, “lives with his mom and nine other siblings in this house.
This film is entirely acted by children who belong to this social class.” The ethnographic or
sociological documentary tone of this introduction thus establishes the director’s intention of
depicting, if not the specific story of historical characters (as in his previous Lúcio Flávio (1978), also
based on a romance-reportagem by José Louzeiro, which depicts the life of a well-known member of
police-backed death squads), the general condition of marginalized children in Brazil, using fiction as a
means of documenting reality and inserting documentary forms into the aesthetic of the film itself. By
pointing to Fernando/Pixote at the beginning of the film and explaining that “the film is entirely acted
by children who belong to this social class,” Babenco in a sense objectifies him and transforms his
individual reality into a symbol for a whole class of children, thus beginning the process of association
that would stigmatize Fernando for the rest of his life.
But the confusion between fiction and reality does not stop there. Fernando himself contributed
to the association that would haunt him and lead to his demise. Frustrated by his inability to continue
developing his career as an actor after Pixote, as was his dream, he decided to rob a house with some
friends in order to “virar notícia” (Venâncio 56), to acquire journalistic notoriety by mimicking the
film’s Pixote. The scheme worked, but not as he expected. From then on, he was stigmatized,
discriminated, and persecuted as a pivete, a marginal, a delinquent youth, and he was never able to rid
himself of that superposition of reality and fiction, of character and actor. The newspaper reportagens
written about him before and after his death reflect that confusion. José Louzeiro wrote after
Fernando’s death:
O filme, de certa maneira, fez mal ao Pixote, ao Fernando. O sucesso também destrói. Ele
encontrou a decepção na televisão. Não era o mundo que ele esperava. Queria que tivessem
respeito por ele. Mas isso não aconteceu. Quando trouxemos ele e a família para o Rio, o
colocamos em um curso de teatro. Ficou lá dois dias. Chamavam ele de ladrãozinho. Um dia
disseram que havia sumido uma carteira e ele ficou todo constrangido. O curso se tornou inviável
para ele. E nenhuma carteira foi roubada. É doloroso ver um rapaz caminhando para este destino
que ele teve. Eu já esperava uqe ele ia terminar assim. É um problema um tanto vergonhoso para
o cinema nacional. (Folha de São Paulo, August 26, 1987)

And the interplay between genres continued. In 1993 José Louzeiro wrote Pixote: a lei do mais forte,
a personal account of Fernando’s brief life that starts as a testimonio recounting Louzeiro’s own
impoverished childhood and his contact with some of the children that would later appear as
characters in Infância dos mortos: Dito, the brutalized child interviewed by Louzeiro in Camanducaia in
the 70s becomes Dito in Babenco’s Pixote; and Pixita, Louzeiro’s childhood friend who committed
suicide after his father’s murder by jumping into shark-infested waters, fused with a street child from
Rio’s train station Central do Brasil to become Pichote in Infância dos mortos and was in turn
transformed by Babenco into Pixote, finally meeting his end in the body of Fernando Ramos da Silva.
Three years later, José Joffily filmed a fictionalized documentary about Fernando’s assassination, Quem
matou Pixote? (1996). And in 1998, Maria Aparecida Venâncio da Silva, Fernando’s widow, encouraged
by José Louzeiro, wrote a testimonio recounting her life with Fernando and his desperate attempts to
avoid the tragic end that seemed to be his unavoidable fate.
That fact and fiction should be enmeshed in such intricate ways leads us to reflect on the
relationship between reality and representation and on the ways the two feed each other. But it also
leads us to reflect on the ways in which representations are a reflection of social fears and desires, and
how they fit within (or conflict with) national narratives that not only pretend to “explain” social
realities but also help justify and perpetuate the privileges of the dominant classes. It is paradoxical

3
that the association between the actor Fernando and the “street child” Pixote—in a film whose
purpose was to humanize child and juvenile delinquency and sensitize Brazilians to the plight of
marginalized children and the dysfunctions of an excluding and repressive social system—should have
resulted in the rather insensitive labels of ladrãozinho and marginal, should have earned him particularly
harsh forms of violence and persecution by the police during his brief life, should have excluded him
from many opportunities, and should have eventually led to his execution. And it is particularly
shocking that many people should have celebrated his assassination as a form of justice and should
have expressed it in such ways as placing banners of support at the police station or giving flowers to
police officers.
It seems to me that at least part of the explanation resides in the fact that the film’s representation
of marginalized children and the institutions that perpetuate such marginalization projects the image
of social illnesses whose recognition threatens hegemonic narratives and fractures notions of national
self-understanding. The apparently incongruous reactions described above, therefore, respond in part
to a need to protect such notions of self-understanding from disintegration.
In the prologue to Chicos en Latinoamérica, an anthology of short stories about children in Latin
America, Susana Cella speaks of the mirada infantil, the child’s gaze or perspective, and its ability to
reveal unexpected aspects of everyday reality and to ask often difficult or uncomfortable questions.
This privileged point of view has been used in literature and film again and again (Lya Luft’s O Ponto
Cego, Andersen’s The Emperor’s Clothes, Rosario Castellanos’ Balún Canán, among many others), allowing
the author to break certain frontiers of perception. When the protagonists are “street children,”
however, the transgression becomes almost unbearable. The mirada (olhar) infantil becomes not only an
alternative perception to an adult understanding, but the revelation of social ills of which we are all, in
one way or another, responsible or complicit.
Pixote: a lei do mais fraco is divided in two roughly equal parts. The first takes place inside the
FEBEM, the juvenile correctional facility where Pixote and a number of other children and teenagers
are detained after having been picked up in the streets of São Paulo, following the death of a judge
during an assault. The second part takes place in the streets of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where
Pixote and three other kids (Dito, Lilica, and Chico) attempt to survive after a revolt in the FEBEM
leads to a collective escape.
Very early in the film, Babenco attempts to provoke spectator identification with Pixote through a
clever and highly effective alternation of point-of-view shots—where the camera shows the world
through Pixote’s perspective—and objective shots—where the spectator becomes an omniscient
observer of the children’s brutal existence. In both instances, it is Pixote’s olhar—that is, the look of
his eyes and his facial expressions during objective shots and his perception of the world during point-
of-view shots—that ensures the film’s emotional effectiveness. Even in the first scenes in the
temporary detention center, before it has been made explicit that Pixote is the film’s protagonist, his
expression is such that the spectator is inevitably drawn to it. An officer reads out the names, age, and
parents’ names of each of the children detained, to which they are to answer “correct!” When Pixote’s
name is called (“João Henrique, 10 years old, Mother: Maria da Costa, Father unknown”), he corrects
the officer: “My father died.” The officer, however, insists authoritatively: “Father unknown!
Correct?” A close-up of Pixote’s face then grabs the spectator with unexpected force. It is not the
bruises on his cheeks and nose that shock us, but rather his eyes, his olhar: a somehow expressionless
gaze, clouded by an unfathomable distance, mute, silenced, and yet poignantly expressive of
something indefinable—solitude, desolation, silent despair… None of these descriptions or any other
seem capable of capturing the meaning of that look, for the simple reason that those eyes are but a
(shattered) mirror that reflects, distorted by the brutality of that world, the pieces of our own notions

4
of childhood, the broken promises of a potential humanity. Capitulating to the State’s imposition over
his own personal story, Pixote looks down and repeats: “correct.”
After role call, a cut takes us to a moving shot of a street at night: shops, pedestrians, cars, all of it
in somber colors punctuated here and there by the bright lights of neon signs. When a cut takes us to
a close-up of Pixote looking through the window of a moving van, we realize that the previous shot
was Pixote’s perception of the street as he is being driven, together with the other children, to the
FEBEM. The close-up of Pixote is strangely reminiscent of a photograph by Michel Perret, from the
collection Robbed Childhood,1 where a doll lays among discarded objects in a montage where the chaos
and anonymity of the city clashes with the soiled innocence of the doll’s eyes, clouded with a silent
despair. The window of the van that carries Pixote reflects the lights of the city and the darkness of
the night, and his expressionless eyes similarly speak of a “robbed childhood.”
In one of the most disturbing scenes, only nine minutes into the film—during the children’s first
night at the FEBEM—, four adolescents surprise a young boy in his sleep, take a piece of glass to his
face, and rape him. But if the scene itself is horrifying, if becomes particularly distressing when the
camera shows Pixote peeking from behind the footboard of his bed. The alternating shots (the rape
and Pixote’s face) thus become the two sides of Pixote’s olhar: what he sees and his expression as he
sees it. And in both cases we are driven to the impossible task of trying to understand the horror from
the perspective of the olhar infantil. Stephen Hart, in his analysis of this scene, entirely misses the point
when he argues that Pixote’s “expressionless face—in that it does not express horror—suggests that
he is beginning to derive a scopophilic pleasure from watching the ‘private’ (…) lives of others” (Hart
95). The force of the scene resides precisely in the indefinability of that look, in its ability to speak to
the whole set of issues regarding marginalized childhood in its contraposition to idealized notions of
childhood. If Pixote’s olhar had expressed only horror, or fear, or “scopophilic pleasure,” the scene
would have lost is force and would have been reduced to a one-dimensional interpretation—the
terrified child, the voyeuristic child. Instead, the ambiguity of Pixote’s look, its apparent lack of
emotion, destroys the certainties of innocent childhood. As the camera slowly zooms in to a close-up
of Pixote’s eyes at the end of the scene, it is as if those eyes were pulling us in, demanding of us the
courage to risk the seemingly impossible task of understanding, tearing us away from the comfort of
our position as passive observers.
Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times that Fernando Ramos da Silva “has one of the most
eloquent faces ever seen on the screen. It’s not actually bruised, but it looks battered. (…) It’s a face
full of expression and one that hardly ever smiles” (cited in Johnson 44-45). The rare times that he
does smile, however, are particularly significant. One of the first times is when he and Fumaça
discover an altar with a black Virgin, gaudily decorated with neon lights, while walking around the
complex at night after having smoked marijuana. Pixote stands there mesmerized and his smiling
expression shows for the first time a childish innocence that is clearly inspired by the maternal figure
of the Virgin. Maternity—or rather, Pixote’s need of a maternal figure—is a recurrent theme
throughout the film. Although the film never gives in to sentimentality, it is during those moments of
maternal attachment that we get a glimpse of the Pixote that hides behind the mask that protects him
from the horrors around him. His softened expression when the teacher is teaching him to write and
the look of silent pain when he is taken away from the psychologist to whom he was about to tell his
“life story” are both revealing of fleeting attachments to motherly figures. As we will see further on,
this need for maternal love gets complicated in the second half of the film, as the realities of violence
and precocious sexuality distort the relationship between the child and the motherly figure in ways
that are deeply disturbing.

1 http://www.art-arte.com/en/robbed-childhood

5
 The importance of the mother figure in Brazilian society, particularly in the lower classes, has
been a constant topic of commentary and debate. The relative absence of the father figure in Brazilian
literature is notable, and many scholars’ analyses of Brazil have pointed to the matrifocal quality of the
lower classes as a point of departure for an understanding of social dynamics. Tobias Hecht, in his
attempt to define meninos de rua, argues that the essential characteristic that distinguishes them from
other children with various relationships to the street is the “betrayal of motherdom” (1998:93-117).
According to him, in the matrifocal family typical of the Brazilian lower classes, children play a
fundamental role as “nurturing children,” contributing actively to the family’s sustenance. It is the
betrayal of this role, the internalized awareness of having betrayed their perceived obligation to
“nurture” their mother, that is the focus of the self-definition of children as “street children.”
Home and the street are not concepts attached primarily to physical spaces; they are notions
revolving largely around the children’s relationship to their mothers and the concomitant
implications of this relationship. (…) But “home is far more than physical proximity to one’s
mother: it implies first and foremost “helping” one’s mother, doing things in the home that she
wants done, accepting her advice and discipline, and augmenting the family income, or sometimes
supplying it entirely.” (Hecht 1998:108-109)

While the “betrayal of motherdom” as the defining characteristic of “street children” might be
debatable,2 what is important to note is that a rupture with the mother figure—much more than a
rupture with the father figure—creates a profound sense of void and orphanage and is often related to
children’s self-definition as meninos de rua.
In the case of Pixote, his mother appears to have abandoned him, as seems evident from a
dialogue between him and his grandfather when he goes to visit him at the FEBEM. Lilica never
mentions his family, but we can infer from his conversations that he has broken with them due to
their disapproval of his sexual orientation. Fumaça’s mother does visit him at the FEBEM, but, when
he asks her to intervene in his favor so he can be released, she tells him that he is better off there than
in the streets. He warns her: “If something happens to me in this rattrap, it will be your fault. Think it
over!” Later, when he is beaten to death by the police, we are left with the feeling that his fate was not
unrelated to his mother’s inaction. Dito, on the other hand, gets terribly upset when he learns that his
mother has gone to visit him, and one of the prison guards is forced to beat him and drag him
forcefully to the warden’s office to see her. While he is there, he refuses to look at her or talk to her,
and leaves as soon as he is allowed. In the next scene we see his mother kissing Sapato—the much
hated, abusive warden—and thus understand Dito’s hatred of her as his reaction to what he considers
an unpardonable betrayal.
It is interesting to note that, in contrast with the numerous mother figures—whether real or
symbolic—in the film, there is only one “father figure,” and that is precisely Sapato. As the warden of
an institution whose official objective is the minor’s “reintegration” into society, Sapato represents the
State’s paternal function, which in theory should fill the void (orphanage) left by the social
environment and the family’s physical or moral “abandonment.” According to a 1979 general report
by the FAMEB—Bahia’s version of the FEBEM—, the institution’s objective was:
…to create permanent incentives and conditions for the development of the preexisting human
capacity, overcoming negative tendencies acquired from the environment by the individual,

2 Although matrifocal families among the poor are certainly common and most children that make the streets their
“organizing locus” do indeed seem to come from matrifocal families, making an unambiguous association between “street
children” and matrifocality might turn a blind eye to the many situations where the male figure plays an important role—
whether positive or negative—in the family dynamics.

6
 recuperating the hope and faith lost and offering a valid meaning for life in society. (Almeida
1982:35)

The FEBEMs implemented, at the state level, the normative policies of the Fundação Nacional
do Bem-Estar do Menor (FUNABEM), which were in turn based on the UN’s Declaration of the
Rights of the Child (20 November 1959). The objectives derived from these policies were as follows
(Almeida 1982:28-29):
I. to formulate and develop community programs for prevention, assistance, and treatment
of minors.
II. to assist minors that are unassisted, abandoned, in social error or danger of social error,
guaranteeing priority to programs for their integration in the community, through help to
the families, family placement, and incentives for adoption and the legitimating of
adoption.
III. to monitor the execution of official policies of assistance to minors, increasing the
parents’ and guardians’ participation in the overall care of minors and the creation and
maintenance of establishments for minors with characteristics of a family life.
IV. to carry out studies, research, and surveys on minors at the state level.
V. to promote training and development of technical and auxiliary personnel necessary to
the accomplishment of its goals.
VI. to register public and private entities dedicated to the problem of minors, establishing
requirements for the functioning of those who receive aid and subsidies.
VII. to regulate the concession of aid and subsidies to entities for the assistance of minors.
VIII. to make accords and contracts with public and private entities.
IX. to collaborate in monitoring, controlling, and assisting minors within the family.
X. to develop any other activities necessary to the accomplishment of its objectives.

Fernanda de Almeida, in her master’s thesis (1982—therefore, during the same period as Pixote),
studied Bahia’s FAMEB and demonstrated the immense distance between the institution’s official
objectives and its actual practice, documenting structural dysfunctions and cases of everyday brutality
and violence against the children, both psychological—e.g., punishing enuresis by making the child
walk naked around the institution’s patio, carrying a sign that reads “mijão” (from mijar, to pee) for
however long his mattress takes to dry—and physical: :
…we found six minors [locked up in individual cells] in subhuman conditions (in complete
darkness; without any form of bodily hygiene; performing their physical needs in the cells; without
any protection against the cold of the night; without any vigilance or monitoring from anyone)…
Some students informed us that they were locked up for approximately eight days… In the girls’
wing, we found three girls locked up in the same subhuman conditions… In addition to the
terrible environmental conditions, the minors were crying convulsively, as well as screaming,
asking for help, demonstrating a very serious state of emotional disorder. (Almeida 1982:99) 3

Thus, the father figure which would in theory fill the void left by an exclusionary social
environment and by the children’s physical or “moral” orphanage, and which should provide the

3 During an interview with the author, Almeida narrated the intimidations and death threats she suffered in the
course of her research.

7
means for social “reintegration” through paternal guidance, becomes a violent, repressive force that
brutalizes the children physically and emotionally and further perpetuates their exclusion.
In the film, as the police look for a scapegoat to blame for the judge’s death, they take the
children out at night, murder two of them, and leave the rest in an adult prison for the night. When
they are returned to the FEBEM, they are locked up naked in solitary confinement (where one of
them falls seriously ill), and Fumaça (Pixote’s closest friend, who is fingered by the police as the child
responsible for the judge’s death) is beaten to death. When Fumaça’s mother takes her son’s case to
the media, the institution’s authorities blame his murder on Garotão (Lilica’s lover). Garotão learns
about this while watching the news during dinner. Overtaken by fear and despair, he threatens Sapato
with a knife. Sapato, however, referring to the law whereby minors’ offenses are erased upon reaching
eighteen years of age, calmly tells him: “You’re making a big deal out of nothing. Even if you had
done it, nothing will happen to you. When you turn 18, you’ll be clean. No one will touch you… I
don’t even want to know that you exist.” Garotão, reassured by the official protection provided by the
law, hands the knife to Sapato. However, as he is ready to walk back to the dormitory together with
the rest of the children, he is grabbed by two guards, who forcefully take him away. Sapato’s enigmatic
phrase (“I don’t even want to know that you exist”) suddenly takes on a different meaning. That
night, while the children are sleeping, his beaten body is left in the dormitory, where he dies in Lilica’s
arms. The children, pushed to their limit, rebel and destroy the dormitory and set it on fire. 4 Once the
rebellion is brought under control, the authorities attempt to blame Garotão’s death on Lilica, in an
endless spiral of death and abuse whereby the paternal figure of the State attempts to cover its own
violence through more violence, picking random scapegoats. When the Minor’s Judge (Juiz de Menores)
visits the institution for an investigation, he addresses the children—who are lined up in orderly
fashion—in paternalistic style: “Tonight someone took a child’s life. I want you to tell me everything
you know, as if you were talking to a father. I’m here to listen to you. Why so much destruction? Isn’t
this your home, which we should all take care of together? What kind of madness is this, to fight each
other to the point of killing each other? You came here to reintegrate to society as useful citizens, and
you are throwing away the greatest opportunity of your life. Why?” When no one will speak to him
during the individual interviews with the children, he comments to the institution’s director: “They are
all deaf, blind, and mute. How frightful!” This dissonance between this paternal official discourse and
the reality of a violent, repressive father/State5 leads the children not only to an increased sense of
orphanage, but, more importantly, to a “delegitimization” of that state of orphanage. They are caught
between two laws: the official law, established in the Minor’s Code, the Declaration of the Rights of
the Child, the statutes of institutions for minors, and official discourses; and the unofficial, unwritten
law, implemented through police brutality and repressive institutions. Rather than representing two
antagonistic forces, these two contradictory laws function as constitutive axes of a single process of
exclusion and marginalization. By insisting on the official discourse, the children are left with no
legitimate means of defense against the violence of the unofficial law. “You are throwing away the
greatest opportunity of your life,” concludes the hegemonic discourse. “They are all deaf, blind, and

4 Violent rebellions in and escapes from the FEBEMs are a constant feature of Brazilian news to this day. See, for
example, “Rebelião em unidade da FEBEM termina com dois feridos”, Folha Online, 3/18/2006; “Tumulto na FEBEM
deixa 9 funcionários e 5 internos feridos,” Folha Online, 2/21/2006; “Internos se rebelam em FEBEM no interior de São
Paulo,” Folha Online, 15/1/2006; “Internos promovem motim em unidade da FEBEM,” Folha Online, 12/2/2005, etc.
5 This dissonance remains to this day. FEBEM’s website, under the scection “Febem na mídia,” contains a long
list of articles such as: “Mostra reúne vencedores de concurso,” “DJs e grafiteros ensinan arte e hip-hop a internos da
Febem,” “Torneio de futsal leva esperança aos jovens da Febem.” However, a Google search for “febem” in Portuguese
leads to innumerable articles about violence, rebellions, abuses, etc. The Human Rights Watch 2005 report “In the Dark:
Hidden Abuses Against Detained Youths in Rio de Janeiro” provides an in-depth look at current conditions of juvenile
detention centers in Rio de Janeiro.

8
mute. Que horror!” The official conclusion is that the children themselves are to blame for their
inability (or unwillingness) to “reintegrate” into society as “useful” citizens—and this conclusion is
echoed by many people’s reaction to Fernando Ramos da Silva’s murder, when the frontiers between
fact and fiction seemed to have dissolved.
Left with no option, the children escape. Pixote, Dito, Chico, and Lilica find themselves in the
streets of São Paulo and, later, Rio de Janeiro, where they create a third, alternative law of survival.
Thus, the film portrays juvenile delinquency as a result not only of economic factors, but of the
repression of the State and of the exclusion provoked by the stigmatization resulting from hegemonic
narratives.
The brighter lighting and vivid colors of the second half of the film contrasts with the somber
quality of the first half—even though much of it is filmed at night and in indoor settings. The scenes
of robbery and games in the streets of São Paulo and the beach scenes in Rio de Janeiro speak of
freedom and joy—both of which prove to be illusory and short lived. “When we get out of here,
brother, no one will stop us,” said Fumaça to Pixote when they were locked up at the FEBEM. But
the hopes of Pixote, Dito, Chico, and Lilica soon start to fade away as they are confronted with the
violent reality of delinquency. The playful and adventurous robberies in the streets of São Paulo turn
to tragedy as they enter into drug trafficking in Rio. When Chico and Pixote walk into a brothel to
demand payment from a prostitute who had tricked them and had stolen their cocaine, a struggle
ensues during which she pushes Chico, who hits his head against the wall and dies. In the heat of the
moment, Pixote stabs the prostitute to death. The three remaining kids then “purchase” an alcoholic
prostitute—Sueli—from a pimp. Together, they trick her clients in order to rob them. Lilica, who
since their days in the streets of São Paulo had become Dito’s lover, leaves after watching him in bed
with Sueli. Finally, when Dito and Pixote attempt to rob one of Sueli’s clients, an American
businessman, he reacts, grabs Dito, and tries to take the gun from him. Sueli tells Pixote to shoot, and
as he does he accidentally kills Dito, and then the American.
Through the character of the prostitute Sueli, Babenco retook the topic of the maternal figure in
ways that profoundly challenged common notions of childhood and motherhood, dealing very directly
with taboos that are deeply disturbing to Brazilian society.
Pixote’s first interaction with Sueli is in the bathroom of the house, where the previous night she
had induced an abortion with a stitching needle. As Pixote stares at the bloodied trash can with the
needle, Sueli says:
“Why are you looking at me that way? You think I should have kept the baby?
“What baby?”
“That baby, porra! What do you think that is? A steak? Your mother didn’t tell you how you came
into this world? It was like that, you piece of shit! He even looks like you… look at him!”

The relationship between Pixote and Sueli develops in very ambiguous ways. While it is evident
that she becomes a mother figure, the relationship is charged with sexuality. As they are celebrating
after their first robbery at a restaurant, Pixote tells Sueli of Lilica’s sexual preferences in the same
breath as he exclaims that he wants to eat a big chocolate ice cream. Then, he kisses her in the mouth
and they both laugh, in a way that has much more to do with motherly pleasure at a son’s childish
antics.
After Dito’s death, Pixote and Sueli watch television in the room. Pixote shows what appears to
be extraordinary coldness. “Don’t talk about Dito,” he tells Sueli as she cries over him, “He’s dead.”
She then suggests that they go together to Minas Gerais, where she is from, and begs him not to leave
her. Pixote does not answer and continues watching a dance show on television, with an

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expressionless face that looks entirely absent. But, suddenly, he vomits. Sueli hugs him, cleans his
mouth with her hands, and pulls his trembling body to her lap as if he was a baby. As she holds him
thus and his shaking begins to subdue, he unbuttons her blouse and starts sucking on her breast.
“Suck it, baby,” says Sueli, rocking him and caressing him. “Mom is here with you…” But after some
time her motherly expression starts changing, a look of despair begins to overtake her. “Leave me
alone, Pixote! I don’t want this!,” she says, and finally she pushes him away violently: “Take that dirty
mouth off me!” Pixote, curled up in bed, covers his ears desperately as she screams at him: “I’m not
your mother, did you hear that? I’m not your mother! I don’t want a son! I hate children! Go live your
own life. We each go our own way. Scram!” Pixote slowly uncurls from his fetal position, gets up,
looking at her with his usual expressionless gaze, picks up his gun, checks the cartridge, puts it in his
pants, and walks out. The final scene shows him walking down the railroad tracks toward an uncertain
future.
This last scene with Sueli has been often interpreted in overly simple, one-dimensional ways.
Sephen Hart’s consistently simplistic interpretation reads thus:
In the ‘climax’ of the film, Pixote turns from watching some beautiful women on the TV, and
feels desire for Sueli. (…) Sueli attempts to mother Pixote, and he takes advantage of this fact in
order to suck her nipple sexually. When Sueli realizes Pixote is not acting as her ‘baby’, she
screams at him to stop, and orders him to leave. (Hart 96)

Robert Levine, on the other hand, does not see the scene’s sexuality:
Sueli (…) briefly comforts Pixote by taking him to her breast, but then, after thinking about
escaping with him to the country to pose as mother and son, she pushes him away. (Levine 206)

The difficulty in reading this scene resides in the fact that it challenges typical categories of
sexuality and motherhood and notions of incest, child sexuality, and sexual abuse. Contemporary
understandings of appropriate sexual behavior for children and toward children are shaken at their
foundation by the “street” children’s fluid contact with sexuality, which is both “adult” (Pixote
watching Sueli and Dito having sex right next to him) and “childish” (Pixote’s kiss), both erotic and
motherly (Pixote sucking on Sueli’s breast).
While the father figure of the State is repressive, arbitrary, and violent, mother figures are
ambiguously erotic, nurturing, and treacherous and, in the final analysis, incapable of providing
grounding for these children, who are left in a deepening state of orphanage.
But this vision of orphanage, while certainly applicable to many children, is incomplete and tends
to give us a skewed image of “street children,” as has been discussed earlier in this thesis. The families
of the children and their social context are entirely left out of the film, except for the brief encounters
during family visits at the FEBEM. This gives us the image of children wandering about the streets
with no footing whatsoever—problematic as it might be—with the family structure and with the
social environment of the favelas and the peripheries of large cities where they come from. In the
process it portrays those children as children of the street, as if the street was somehow their “natural”
context. The film thus avoids delving into much more complicated systemic issues that play a
fundamental role in understanding the reality of marginalized childhood. This is perhaps the only
serious flaw in a film that otherwise does an excellent job at portraying the lives of marginalized
children and the institutions that perpetuate that marginalization.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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ao menor. Master’s thesis. Salvador: Universidade Federal da Bahia, 1982.
Babenco, Hector. Pixote. Film. Brazil: Unifilm/Embrafilm. 1981.
Carrera, Gilca Oliveira. Por detrás das murallas: práticas educativas da medida de internação. Masters thesis.
Salvador: Faculdade de Educação, Universidade Federal da Bahia, 2005.
Cella, Susana (org.). Chicos en Latinoamérica. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Instituto Movilizador
de Fondos Cooperativos, 1994.
DaMatta, Roberto. A casa e a rua: Espaço, cidadania, mulher e morte no Brasil. São Paulo: Editora
Brasiliense, 1985.
Hart, Stephen M. A Companion to Latin American Film. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2004.
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Hecht, Tobias. At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil. Cambridge; New York:
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Joffily, José. Quem Matou Pixote? (Who Killed Pixote?). Film. Brazil. 1996.
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Brazilian Review, Vol. 24, Num. 2, Winter 1987, p. 35-48.
Levine, Robert M. “Pixote: Fiction and Reality in Brazilian Life.” In Stevens, Donald (ed.) Based on a
True Story: Latin American History at the Movies, Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1997,
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Lodoño, Fernando Torres. “A origem do conceito do menor.” In Del Priore, Mary (org.). História da
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