A group of young boys stare vacantly at a small screen, watching a movie in a silent daze. With a context yet to be established, the scene could be of any typical group of children gathered in some social setting. But as Héctor Babenco’s Pixote continues, it’s quickly shown that such an innocuous scenario couldn’t be further from the truth. These kids, wayward juvenile delinquents mostly, have been rounded up in the wake of a recent murder. Nearly all of them look defeated and damaged. They’re crammed in a rundown reformatory, a setting that will soon reveal itself to be a hellish realm of depravity, cruelty and fear. Befitting the film’s subtitle, “The Law of the Weakest,” Pixote’s youth grow successively hardened, physically and emotionally, even more so than they already were as a result of their impoverished, mired lives outside the center. They are prematurely jaded, necessarily so for the sake of their existence, and their psychological constitution, their moral compass and their concept of a conceivable livelihood becomes tragically, irrevocably warped. 

Written by Babenco and Jorge Durán, based on A Infância dos Mortos (The Childhood of the Dead Ones) by José Louzeiro, this 1980 Brazilian film is an overwhelmingly bleak coming of age tale, effectively divided into two parts. Its opening establishes a jaw dropping state of affairs where the youth are subject to an ill-equipped, uncaring system, a naive institution that thrives on the blatant pretense of reform and education, but it is, in reality, a foundation built on abuse and neglect. The boys, most of whom suffer at the hands of the guards and their fellow occupants, are habitually challenged by a perverted sexuality that is both immature and vicious, and are tempted by the allure of assuaging drug use, from a cautiously passed joint to a canister of glue primed for huffing. But Pixote encompasses a wide array of characters with fluctuating degrees of prominence and influence, a constant figure emerges. 

As something of an intermediary for the viewer, Pixote’s title character is played by pre-teen Fernando Ramos da Silva, a primary protagonist who at first is basically observant then becomes incrementally consumed by his lot in life. In a film distinguished for its astonishing child performances, the sheer bewilderment in da Silva’s eyes exposes a soulful humanity, hitherto denied and deprived and encased by a face aged beyond its years, literally and figuratively scarred by a short life of hardship (da Silva was himself killed by Brazilian police at 19). The age of Pixote and those around him is one of the more jarring aspects of Babenco’s film, which puts these actors in situations of unsettling vulnerability while also stressing the juvenile qualities of their temperament. Pixote will stab someone in one scene, for instance, and enthusiastically visit an arcade in the next. And even in the reformatory, the kids enjoy a bit of play acting — emulating a bank robbery, of course — confirming, troublingly so, that they are just children after all.

Where Pixote delivers a profoundly distressing portrait of day-to-day survival, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment concentrates on an individual struggle in which the main character expresses concern of a private nature as well as one with national, indeed international, repercussions. Written by Gutiérrez and Edmundo Desnoes, based on the latter’s novel Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Inconsolable Memories), this 1968 feature follows Sergio Carmona, played by Sergio Corrieri, a writer making his way through the existential void that is 1960s Cuba. Set during a period fraught with social and political upheaval, Memories of Underdevelopment opens in 1961 Havana as vast swarms of people flee the country’s increasing instability. Sergio, bidding goodbye to his wife, fully expects the disbanding of his marriage after she arrives in Florida. Truth be told, as seen in painfully emotional flashbacks and heard in contentious recordings, the union was hardly secure to begin with. Spanning a period that includes the Cuban revolution and the Cuban missile crisis, Memories of Underdevelopment largely assumes the vantage of Sergio’s intellectual, inbred cynicism. He ambles alone, aimlessly, his narration providing background on the variable sociopolitical developments and illuminating his individual views. Plagued by an apathetic lethargy, he goes over the artifacts of his prior life as if seeing them in total for the first time, while also remarking, as he surveys the city via an aptly detached telescope, “nothing has changed.” 

That may be contrary to what is in fact occurring, but what is occurring proves secondary to how Sergio perceives it, and how he responds. Even more than da Silva, whose observations are mostly passive and reserved, Corrieri, then age 28, playing a 38-year-old character, is the adopted conduit for viewer engagement. Via Sergio’s fantasies and recollections, rendered in a variety of stylistic modes, Gutiérrez presents a subjective take on what surrounds the affluent eyewitness, amplified by a multi-media exhibition of political propaganda and historical accounts. Essentially caught in the midst of war between global superpowers, namely the United States and Russia, the Cuba of Memories of Underdevelopment is populated by a citizenry besieged by hunger, poverty, confusion and death. But Sergio is emphatically removed from this chaos, falling back on the decadence and economic superiority of his privileged lifestyle: “I’m not like them,” he declares, truthfully or not. 

While Sergio is adamant about his distance from the masses and responds to what he sees with a hostile distain, contending “people seem more stupid every day” and chiding Ernest Hemingway for the author’s superficial adoration of the region, that doesn’t prevent him from seeking out personal encounters, primarily in the form of transient sexual relationships. Elena (Daisy Granados), a teenager Sergio picks up while on one of his drifting sojourns, becomes a notable companion, but even she is promptly subordinate to his irritation and settles as an emblematic figure of his frivolity and the futility of his interpersonal assignations. Sergio’s off-putting personality surely makes him a begrudging antihero, if such a dramatically suggestive terms applies in the case of Memories of Underdevelopment, with its episodic and generally fatalistic narrative. Yet, at the same time, he garners immense interest by the conscientiousness of his introspection, however acidic, and his subtle expression of regret tinged with resignation and indifference. 

Pixote’s latter half finds a handful of the boys back on the streets of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, illustrating an alternate though no less frightening life outside the center walls. Pixote, now with a contracted group of associates, devolves into petty thievery, drug dealing and — after their encounter with a prostitute, Sueli (Marília Pêra) — the life of a budding pimp. The film thus expands its conditional examination, not unlike Memories of Underdevelopment, into a broader portrayal of pervasive danger and volatility. It is now disclosed just how pronounced and rampant the hopelessness of the milieu is for certain individuals; the no-way-out despair and desperation feeds their squalid environment, and vice-versa. Although the film is relentless in its brutality and palpable rage, Babenco affords one moment of fleeting tenderness between Pixote and Sueli, but it is short-lived and undercut somewhat by the gruesome and alarming scenes that preceded it.