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Film Review: Casa Grande

In the locker room of his private, all boys high school, 17-year-old Jean bickers with his classmates over an unpaid debt. “Like father, like son,” says one of Jean’s friends before the boys collide in a classic locker-room brawl. It’s an emotional and revealing scene in Casa Grande (literally “the big house,” but released under its English title, The Ballad of Poor Jean), which examines class hierarchy and race in Brazil.

The plot focuses on Jean, the son of an upper-class Carioca family in Rio de Janeiro that is facing...

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