When we are small, everything seems so much bigger – not only the scale of things but also the passage of time. The never-ending days all seem the same, and summer trudges pleasantly along with time expanding in monotony. When you have to return with your parents to their home village and leave your friends behind – as the main character does in this film – this sense of lethargy becomes a fixation, especially on the longest days. “Verão” (“Summer”) depicts the passage of time from the point of view of a young boy, alone with his football and his imagination, left to his own devices in a world without adults. His melancholy is constructed moment by moment, an idyllic representation of a summer holiday when nothing happens and where solitude, silence, and youth are his only companions. It is also an elegy to the nonchalance of leisure and the notion of fragile contentment. At the point when the boy finds himself farthest away from what is closest to him – a kind of solstice of the heart – the film finds refuge nearby in nostalgia for yesterday. (JA)