Excellent movie. I saw it at the Seattle International Film Festival. You can watch the trailer for this Brazilian movie here (sadly, the trailer is pretty bad and does not reflect the quality of the movie).
The House of Sand is set in the early 1900s. Fernanda Torres' husband drags her to the middle of nowhere in the state of Maranhao, in the northern part of Brazil. It's a
beautiful place, but all they get is sand as far as the eye can see. It appears they are running away from debt.
Torres, in turn, drags her mom with her. The mom is played by her real-life mom, Fernanda Montenegro. Montenegro is the only Brazilian actresses ever to be nominated for an Oscar. She got her nomination in 1999 for her role in Central Station (she lost to Gwyneth). The House of Sand shows a few generations into Fernandas' family in an ingenious way (you need to watch the movie to know how).
Seu Jorge (who is also a singer -- a famous singer in Brazil) knows his way around the 'neighborhood' and helps Fernanda out with food, etc. By the way, Seu Jorge's rendition of Life on Mars, from David Bowie, is one of the nicest songs ever, you have got to check it out. He did it for Life Aquatic.
We had a tiny bit of content for our gay movie review. In one scene, Fernanda Torres wanders into some barracks and starts to go through the objects there. She picks up an Eca de Queiroz book and inside it she sees a few pictures, one of the them pretty naughty. The naughty one displays three people, two girls and a guy. Here's the setting for the picture: the girl is laying down on the couch providing bj services to the guy, meanwhile, she has a girl down on her. 
Yay! Go lesbians / bisexuals! The picture is barely onscreen, it's shown for just a very brief moment, but you see the two girls clearly.
Oh, and Fernanda Torres goes frontal, and we see Seu Jorge's butt. That was a pretty hot scene.
Young Brazilian director Andrucha Waddington (pic left) is not bad looking in a scruffy way.
This is what should be called a family movie. Fernanda Montenegro is Fernanda Torres' mom, and Torres is married to Andrucha.
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