In some ways ‘Central Station’ is a film rooted in its time, yet it also plays like a road movie whose themes remain timeless. Watching it today, especially in a 4K restoration, reminds us not only of how cinema has changed over the past quarter century but also how the world around us has shifted.

The premise already feels almost quaint: in 1998, the idea of approaching someone in a train station to write a letter on your behalf – because you couldn’t read or write – was believable. Today, with literacy support and even tools like ChatGPT, such a practice feels archaic. Yet this is precisely what propels the story. Dora (Fernanda Montenegro), a retired elementary school teacher in Rio de Janeiro, earns a living by writing letters for illiterate clients, even offering to post them. But she isn’t always convinced the letters should reach their intended recipients. In one case, she withholds a letter from a woman hoping to reunite her son with his estranged father, suspecting the man may be violent and believing she is protecting the boy.

When that same woman dies suddenly, Dora is unexpectedly drawn into the life of her nine-year-old son, Josué (Vinícius de Oliveira). What begins as an opportunistic decision – she even tries to sell the boy into adoption before realising the darker reality of child trafficking – becomes a moral turning point. Dora rescues him, and together they set out on a journey across Brazil to find the father Josué never knew.

The film’s strength lies in its incidental details. Their journey is full of small transgressions and reversals: Dora scolds Josué for shoplifting, only to later steal herself; moments of trust give way to betrayal and back again; hopes are raised, dashed, and renewed. Their companionship grows not through grand gestures, but through quiet, fragile acts of connection.

Walter Salles directs with patience and care, crafting a film that moves slowly but deliberately. At 25, when the film was first released, I might have found its pacing frustrating. Now it feels essential – an elegiac rhythm that lingers, leaving an indelible impression.

At heart, ‘Central Station’ is not about arriving but about the act of travelling together. It is a story of two people at opposite ends of life – an older woman and a young boy – finding in each other a possibility of renewal. The ending, with Josué reunited with family he never knew and Dora smiling through tears on the bus back to Rio, is at once bittersweet and euphoric. It is a rite of passage for both, offering a kind of peace without neat resolution.

A quarter century on, ‘Central Station’ remains both a time capsule and a universal fable, and is tender, slow-burning, and profoundly moving.