One day I felt like dying and wished I had never been born. Weak and alone, I sat in front of a bonfire that burned and liberated ashes blown away by the wind. On June 23, 1984, in the city of Salvador, Bahia, northeast Brazil, I Had spent the day with my father, who the night before, was surprised by a cerebral hemorrhage that paralyzed the entire left side of his body, leaving him lying motionless on a bed. This was too much for me to handle since I still hadn’t been able to get past my mother’s death on March 27, 1983. Never before had I been so confused like I was that day. I was thirteen years old. That night I wore a white worn-out shirt and a pair of jeans that I had worn to school. I was sitting on my doorstep, so sad, as I watched my friends playing around (the bonfire on the night of the June festival), and I thought about everything. Everything, except that one day I would be an author and a movie director in the city of the stars of Hollywood so dreamt of by millions. Here I am, in the United States of America, twenty-seven years later, writing a script in order to start filming the story that inspired me. The story that is about a student, a policeman, and a beggar.