Boy 23

In 2010 a Brazilian farmer discovers that every brick of his outhouses is stamped with the swastika. Once the property of the aristocratic Rocha Miranda family, there are other disturbing facts unearthed by historian Sidney Aguilar Filho. In the 1930s, fifty orphan boys were transported from Rio to the isolated farm, in a Brazil recently freed of slavery yet obsessed with racial purity and the burgeoning Nazi pseudo-science of eugenics. So, no one intervened when the boys, all black and now numbered, lived and slaved in conditions similar to those of the concentration camps. “23” – Aloisio Silva – survives, with unrequited rage in a country just as terrifyingly prejudiced and secretive as it was in his stolen youth.

Courtesy of the Director