The Blue Trail

AroView: A dazzling Brazilian drama set in a serenely dystopian near-future in which the elderly over a certain age threshold are interned into housing ‘colonies’, where an unverified fate awaits.

Denise Weinberg is terrific as a 77-year-old with other ideas about how she’ll see out her days, which leads to her embarking on a random, risky journey on the Amazon river with a strange boating companion who introduces her to adventure, mystery and mischief via the ‘blue trail’. Captivating from the outset, the incredible scenery and world-building are taken to the next level by some truly luminous photography, and it’s also quite funny, too, underpinned by the cultural richness and towering class divide of contemporary Brazil.

“What’s remarkable about The Blue Trail and makes it such a delight is that despite all the oppression in the air, it’s a movie filled with hope and faith in human resilience at any age.” ~David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

“Few films this year have been as soulful or as quietly defiant.” ~Siddhant Adlakha, Observer

“Mascaro’s wry and witty new film will remind savvy audiences of bleak apocalyptic films about humanity’s potential loss of feeling against technologies that crush them.” ~Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire