Set in Brazil in 1970, The Year My Parents Went on Vacation tells a very personal story through the eyes of its 11-year-old protagonist while simultaneously commenting on two compelling national issues: the student communist movement against Brazil’s dictatorship and Brazil’s historic World Cup soccer championship. In addition, we get an intimate look into a prominent Jewish community in Sao Paulo, providing an extra layer of authenticity to a very universal story,
in the tradition of A Bronx Tale or Undertow or Nowbody Knows.
The performance by Michel Joelsas as the young Mauro is outstanding. Mauro has essentially been benignly abandoned by his parents, and his face conveys that his situation has evoked a mixture of emotions that he is unable to immediately recognize, let alone process. It is too bad that Mauro’s voiceover during the film’s coda underestimates both the character’s growth and the audience’s empathy. Nonetheless, the time we have spent with Mauro on his journey has been more than rewarding enough to forgive the filmmaker’s last-moment tumble into sentimentality.
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
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