Because We Were Born’s co-director Jean-Pierre Duret began his career in the mid-80s as a boom operator and sound assistant on the films of Louis Malle and Jacques Doillon, and more recently, he’s led the sound work on the films of Francois Ozon, Agnes Jaoui and the Dardennes Brothers. This pedigree surely helped Born, Duret and Andrea Santana’s thrid nonfiction film set in Northeast Brazil, land a premiere slot last fall at the Venice Film Festival, a placement that even the Variety review admitted “may have minimized the attention it garnered as it may have gotten lost among the large number of films showing there.” After moving on to Rotterdam and opening theatrically in France, Born’s future festival schedule is currently somewhat up in the air. It’s hard to say what the ideal showcase for this game-changing work of neo-verite might be — it’s probably not the pizza-and-beer Alamo Drafthouse atmosphere of SXSW, nor the “issues only, please” doc programs of some, well, less fun festivals –– but if it ends up in your town, you’d be well served to run toward it as fast as you can.

Duret and Santana follow two teenage boys living in fairly extreme poverty in a rural Brazilian village. Nego, 13, is one of ten children born to a still-young but extremely world-weary single mom, whose many baby daddies have either left her a widow or for other reasons left her and her brood behind. He hangs out at a local truckstop/gas station with Cocada, a 14 year-old without a father who’s determined to learn to drive a truck … or become a thief. When we first meet these boys, they’re loitering around the truckstop, watching drivers eat, discussing strategies for staving off hunger (one recommends coffee). We assume that the both of them live on the street, with no easy access to a decent meal.

But in the next scene, we follow Nego to his home, a spare and somewhat squalid shack where his mom is nonetheless serving up bowls of eggs and meat to each of her many kids, which the children eat huddled around an old TV. This makeshift recreation of a classic nuclear family scene becomes the first of many moments where the directors shame our assumptions of What Exotic Poor People Look Like, revealing the full picture to be infinetly more compicated as the people at its center reveal themselves to be not archetypes, but charismatic characters that most narrative filmmakers couldn’t invent in equal.

The directors spent six months with Cocada, Nego and their families, shooting fly-on-the-wall style with zero filmmaker intervention. The result is something like a Dardennes film without the traditional, melodramatic beats (a sex scene here, a chase scene there) that those Belgian brothers anchor their narratives with. Nego and Cocada’s stories, such as they are, emerge slowly out of layer upon layer of snapshot vignette, and can only end up in ellipsis.

A tension is set up between the promise of Lula, the Brasilian president who is seen campaigning for a second term in the village by reminder the poor folks that live there that he used to be one of them, and the binds of poverty, the need to work tomorrow just to pay for the debts incurred today. Cocada’s story comes to dramatize this tension when the boy becomes torn between two versions of manhood, one embodied by a truckdriver who takes Cochada under his wing (and thus offers a vision of urban independence), the other by a relative who makes bricks to trade for livestock, and eventually rides his mule-driven cart to the gas station to procure lighter fluid so he can cremate a dead cow (thus bringing a reminder of where Cocada comes from directly to his point of entry for escape).

In the film’s most memorable moments, and those where its theses seem most seamlessly fused with its aesthetic aims, the boys sit around the truckstop, staring into the night, talking about their unpleasant present and their not-particularly grandiose but still probably unrealistic dreams of the future. “We have to leave here to know ourselves,” one says to the other. Self-knowledge has rarely seemed so tragically unattainable.