We have just lost an exceptional young artist and poet to suicide earlier in the week. He was also a committed activist. His loss will no doubt affect the course of art history in this country, a fact that he must have been keenly aware of himself.

As I sat watching a film on the decline and death of Heleno de Freitas, Brazil’s first football superstar, there was therefore a resonance somewhere. Self-inflicted mortality takes many forms. And rarely has it been recorded with as much visual intensity as Jose Henrique Fonseca’s eponymous film Heleno. I am not a football fan and had never heard of Heleno, who lived between 1920 and 1959, in Brazil. I later realised that I probably would not have known of his achievements anyway even if I was, given the fact that he was more a myth than real memory for his very own people. Projected as a football film, Heleno is, in fact, a brilliantly shot documentation of the human ego and its frailties. Intensely culture specific, Heleno demands the viewers’ empathy through Rodrigo Santoro’s stellar performance. The extraordinary incisiveness with which Santoro (he played Xerxes in ‘300’) moves from playing the charismatic playboy and a football genius to the broken addict wasting away in a sanatorium is quite breathtaking. Very rarely do we come across such histrionic versatility in an actor and, without Santoro, the film would not have existed despite the lyrical (yet pertinently grainy) cinematography in black and white and the expert editing. Crafted in a mock new wave style, one finds it difficult to believe that we are not actually watching a 1950’s film but a piece created as recently as 2012.

Heleno definitely transcends its genre and is an example of how we instinctively relate to good works of art despite cultural differences. I quote here Eduardo Galeano’s gem of an introduction to the footballer in his classic Soccer in Sun and

Shadow: “Heleno de Freitas was clearly a Gypsy. He had Rudolph Valentino’s face and the temper of a mad dog. On the playing field, he sparkled...One night at the casino he lost all his money. Another night, who knows where, he lost all his desire to live. And on his last night, delirious in a hospice, he died.” Heleno never won a World Cup, never won any major tournament, yet he was the prince of Rio.

While nothing in Heleno was familiar, everything was in the other film that caught my attention last week. The efficiency with which director Deepak Rauniar has brought us a slice of Nepali people’s current predicament in Seto Surya, is humbling if nothing else. The film speaks of a reality that we in Kathmandu try and shove under the door mat while the rest of Nepal lives every day. It is epic in terms of content for it symbolises the core, vital issues that disable us all if in different ways. And manages to capture at one go some of the raging contradictions ailing this country over the course of a mere 88 minutes. While Heleno went straight into the paradox of the human mind, Seto Surya brings us the many paradoxes that we live out socially—be it caste differences and traditional rituals in a fast changing world or gender discrimination; be it political ideologies at loggerheads; be it hard won victories made hollow by sham leaderships; or be it the human bond that overcomes all such differences. Mortality here was central again. The film starts with the death of an erstwhile VDC chairperson and documents the many travails his dead body must undergo to reach final and much-awaited cremation. While Heleno delves into the gradual dismemberment of the human ego, Seto Surya symbolically explores the ethical demise of a society. I recommend both.

Heleno will be screened at Yalamaya Kendra this Sunday at 5pm (free entrance); Seto Surya is playing at theatres in the city right now.