Brazilian director Carolina Markowicz won awards left, right and centre for her touching 2018 short film The Orphan (O Órfão), about a queer teenage boy suddenly placed in an unfamiliar family. Her feature debut, Charcoal, once again centres around an outsider forcibly placed in the heart of family, but this time the algebra of sympathy is much more complex – and the threat of violence adds an unquantifiable extra variable.
In rural Brazil, Irene (Maeve Jinkings) holds her struggling nuclear family together as best she can. Her husband Jairo (Rômulo Braga) earns money seasonally burning charcoal, but when he’s out of work he spends what little he has on booze. The couple’s nine-year-old son Jean (Jean de Almeida Costa, a real find) is a sweet kid who shares a bedroom with his bedridden grandfather Firmino (Benedito Alves), who has had a stroke and can no longer walk, talk or breathe without additional oxygen.
