Gugu’s World

Bluesky

Allan Deberton’s third feature, Gugu’s World, understands childhood authenticity as something you don’t “discover” so much as get granted. For Gugu ( Yuri Gomes), that grant comes from one person, his maternal grandmother Dilma (Teca Pereira), whose house and quick tongue create a pocket of permission. In their small community by the Araújo Lima reservoir, Deberton frames that permission as physical and everyday. Gugu is almost 12, dreaming of becoming a footballer, moving through the village with a confidence that refuses the usual policing of boys’ gaits, bodies, and colours.

His flamboyance isn’t staged as a headline or a lecture. He loves pink, he plays soccer, he performs himself without waiting for approval, and the narrative lets that be ordinary rather than exceptional. Gomes, in a debut that feels borderline unfair for its command, gives Gugu a rhythm that’s both sassy and deeply observant. His face can flip from mischief to inventory-taking in a second, as if he’s constantly reading the room for where safety begins and ends. The bond with Dilma is the story’s first great relief, not because it’s sentimental, but because it’s specific. Their exchanges have the snap of two people who’ve made a shared language out of teasing, caregiving, and tiny daily rituals.

But when Dilma’s memory starts to deteriorate, so does the only refuge Gugu has known – a home where he can exist without translating himself. Deberton keeps it quiet: no melodramatic “episodes,” just the subtle sense of a room cooling, routines loosening, safety becoming conditional. Gugu answers with labour, trying to keep their days intact. Beyond the house, the reservoir tells the same story. A dam once drowned a town; now the water pulls back, and what was submerged becomes visible again, piece by piece.

Outside that safe zone, the world is less generous. Gugu’s father Batista (Lázaro Ramos) looms as the steady drip of judgment, remarried after the loss of his mother, now building a new household whose normality feels like an accusation. The father’s problem is not only his son’s clothes or gestures. It’s that Gugu’s ease exposes how thin the rules are. When adults insist on “proper” boyhood, it’s usually because they need the category to hold for themselves. The Brazilian drama doesn’t make the father a cartoon villain, but it doesn’t excuse him either. His criticism lands as a kind of theft, an attempt to repossess a child’s self-definition before it hardens into adulthood.

Deberton keeps the camera close and attentive to micro-gestures, letting tenderness register in small acts of care rather than speeches. That approach suits the material, and at its best gives the narrative a lived-in emotional texture. Even so, Gugu’s World does not entirely avoid the well-worn beats of coming-of-age storytelling, and parts of its arc unfold too neatly. What keeps it compelling is not surprise but sensitivity: the way it understands that being yourself is easiest where you are loved without conditions, and quietly devastating when that shelter begins to weaken. The result is a charming and affecting work that does not reinvent the form, but handles its emotional stakes with sincerity and grace.

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