Ask the Brazilian director Walter Salles about the new wave of Latin American film-making that has electrified world cinema for the past decade or so and he puts it down to the fact that the region is “the last frontier”. “We are still countries in the making,” he says. “Our national identities in Brazil and Argentina are not fully crystallised, we’re still inventing ourselves – much more so than Europe.”

The multilingual son of a diplomat, the urbane and rather dashing Salles is certainly the most eloquent spokesman for the film-making talent of the Americas. He first caught the attention of international audiences with Central Station in 1998. In 2004 he turned Che Guevara’s account of a formative trip, The Motorcycle Diaries, into an exploration of Latin American identity, assisted by a talented pan-American cast and crew.

Now Salles has co-directed, with his long-term collaborator Daniela Thomas, Linha de Passe. The title is the name of a game played by four kids with a football – the idea is to keep the ball in the air. It’s a fitting metaphor for the lives of four fatherless brothers. Denis, Dinho, Dario and Reginaldo have been raised by Cleuza, careworn and with another child on the way. Through the boys’ journeys, the film explores three constants of Brazilian life: football, faith and family.

“Soccer is religion in Brazil,” Salles says. “It also fulfils a role that the state doesn’t fulfil, in a way. When the state is not present, you have to belong to something, be part of something that provides you with a shield, and be recognised as part of something larger than your life. To be part of a large supporting clan is to be part of a nation, in a way. Going to a church is similar. When the state is not there to provide your needs, you go to church to be part of a different nation.”

Of the four boys, Dinho has found a support structure in an evangelical church and Dario (played by Vinicius De Oliveira, who starred in Central Station as a child) is a talented player who hopes that his skill will help him to break through the parameters enforced by poverty. The youngest boy, 14-year-old Reginaldo, is darker skinned than his siblings. He spends his days riding the city buses, searching for the father he has never met. And the oldest, Denis, is a motorcycle courier who has already started to leave a conspicuous hole in the life of his own baby son.

The absent father is a recurring motif in Salles’s films – Foreign Land, his first collaboration with Thomas, and Central Station also have it. “Statistics suggest that 20 per cent of Brazilian households are single-mother households,” he says. “The absence of the father is something that defines us. Historically, we were named Brazil by the Portuguese colonisers after a tree. And the first thing they did was to take out all of these trees – you don’t find them any more – together with the gold and silver and before they left they impregnated many of the Indians. So there was this first generation of fatherless Brazilians.”

Urgent, constantly moving camerawork and restless editing give some sense of the assault on the senses that is life in São Paulo. “It’s a city with 20 million inhabitants, a city with no horizon, a city with 300km of traffic jams and 300,000 messengers on motorcycles.”

There is no shortage of stories in this mercurial, unknowable city. Thomas, who wrote the screenplay, spent five years gathering inspiration. Reginaldo’s tale, which ends with a joyride in a borrowed bus, is based on a true story. And an estimated two million boys just like Dario have trials for football clubs annually. “It’s a tragic drama that plays out every year,” says Thomas. “These kids spend a lot of time practising, maybe they don’t go to school. And when they get to 19 they have nothing.”

Both Salles and Thomas talk extensively about the increasing gap between rich and poor in Brazil. But this class structure is arguably also present in the country’s film industry which, while it frequently turns its lens on to the favelas, or shanty towns, is predominantly populated by the wealthy middle classes.

There’s a slightly awkward moment during the interview when Thomas argues that she learnt about São Paulo’s impoverished underclass from her household staff.

“In Brazil you have this incredible relationship with the people who work in your house. You learn a lot from living with these people,” she says.

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