Some films announce themselves loudly. Others simply put you beside a character, ask you to walk with him for a little while, and leave you somewhere different by the time the credits roll.
Socrates is very much the second kind.
The acclaimed Brazilian drama is now streaming on Dekkoo, bringing one of the most affecting queer coming of age stories of recent years to our collection of gay movies from around the world.
Fifteen Years Old and Suddenly Alone
Socrates is fifteen years old when his mother dies.
There is no comfortable period of mourning waiting for him. There is rent to pay. There is work to find. There are adults who may decide that he is incapable of looking after himself. And there is the simple reality of surviving on the margins of São Paulo with very little money and even less protection.
Played by Christian Malheiros in a remarkable debut performance, Socrates moves through this world with a toughness that never quite hides how young he really is.
That tension is at the heart of the film.
Director Alexandre Moratto does not turn Socrates into a symbol or reduce his life to a collection of hardships. He lets him be angry. Proud. Sexual. Frightened. Stubborn. Lonely. Sometimes all of those things at once.
And then Socrates meets Maicon.
Desire Does Not Make Life Any Simpler
What develops between Socrates and Maicon gives the film some of its most intimate moments, but this is not a conventional romance.
Desire arrives in the middle of everything else.
Socrates is grieving his mother. He is trying to keep a roof over his head. He is confronting poverty, racism and homophobia. He is attempting to hold onto his independence when almost every force around him seems capable of taking it away.
His sexuality is part of that story without becoming the entirety of it.
That is one of the reasons Socrates feels so immediate. It understands that coming of age does not happen separately from the rest of life. Love, sex, grief, money, family and survival all collide.
For viewers drawn to emotionally complex gay drama movies, this is exactly the kind of film worth seeking out.
A Film Made by the Young People It Portrays
There is another remarkable story behind the camera.
Socrates was the first feature produced through Brazil’s Querô Institute, an organization that uses filmmaking as a tool for social inclusion among young people from low income communities. Teenagers connected to the program participated in the writing, production and acting of the film.
That gives Moratto’s debut an authenticity that is difficult to manufacture.
The streets, cramped rooms, job sites and crowded spaces surrounding Socrates do not feel like scenery arranged around a character. They feel like his world.
Moratto also had some impressive support behind the film. Ramin Bahrani served as a producer and Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles, director of City of God, was among its executive producers.
A Breakout Performance From Christian Malheiros
A movie this intimate depends enormously on its lead actor.
Christian Malheiros carries it.
His performance as Socrates earned him a nomination for Best Male Lead at the Film Independent Spirit Awards. The film was also nominated for the John Cassavetes Award, while Moratto received the Someone to Watch Award for his direction.
Those accolades make sense when you watch the film.
Malheiros rarely seems to be performing for us. He makes Socrates difficult to look away from precisely because he never begs for our sympathy. There is enormous vulnerability underneath the character, but there is also defiance.
Socrates wants more than survival.
He wants a life that belongs to him.
Queer Cinema Without Easy Answers
There is no attempt here to make hardship beautiful.
There are no easy speeches about identity. No convenient savior arrives. No neat solution suddenly appears because the movie needs to end.
Instead, Socrates gives us something more valuable: a queer character allowed to be complicated.
That is part of what makes international LGBTQ cinema so exciting. There are countless experiences of being gay, falling in love, discovering desire and figuring out who you are. The best films let those stories remain specific to the people and places from which they come.
It is also why we continue searching the world for films like this to bring to Dekkoo.
If Socrates leaves you wanting to discover more, explore our collection of gay films streaming online or dive into more stories from Latin America with Dekkoo Selects: Latin Heritage.
Watch Socrates Now on Dekkoo
Socrates is raw, intimate and deeply human. It is a film about grief and poverty, but also about desire, dignity and the stubborn determination to keep moving forward when the world offers very few reasons to believe things will get better.
Most of all, it is a reminder of what great queer cinema can do.
It can take us somewhere unfamiliar and make one person’s life feel extraordinarily close.
Socrates is streaming now on Dekkoo.
