It's the summer of 1970 in Brazil, and 12-year-old Mauro's radical parents have left him at his grandfather's house so hastily that they don't realize the old man has just died of a heart attack. Alone in a Jewish neighborhood that accepts him despite his gentile mother, Mauro tries to focus on the essentials: girls and soccer. But real life keeps knocking at his grandfather's door, via the elderly, solemn Shlomo, who is dead-set on locating the boy's AWOL family. The Year My Parents Went on Vacation captures a rarely documented aspect of Brazilian history with a calm and sweet unsentimentality.