Abstract
This essay examines two contemporary films whose child protagonists end up in exile due to the violent military regimes in their respective native countries: Paisito (Small country, 2008), a Spanish-Uruguayan-Argentine coproduction that attempts to construct a Transatlantic poetics of exile and memory, and yet fails; and a Brazilian film, O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias (The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, 2006), which places exiles at the center of a nostalgic, nationalist discourse in which Brazil appears as a multiethnic, multicultural and multiracial ideal space threatened by the military dictatorship. Both Paisitoand The Year represent the 1970s in Uruguay and Brazil, countries torn by a military coup and a military dictatorship. In both films, soccer is presented as a central space, although it is at times questioned as a force for national cohesion; and in both films the child protagonists face exile when their fathers are killed by the military regimes. Both expose how the state uses soccer as a tool of collective appeasement, and yet the nostalgic recuperation of soccer as game seems in some way to infantilize the politics of memory.
Published Version
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