1 – O Caso [S07E01]

October 31, 2024·1 hr 20 min·6 clips

Cassiano says his father taught him to ride a bike and talk about planes — then disappeared when Cassiano was 12, just after Christmas 1986.

The episode starts on a street. In Curitiba, Ivan Mizanzuki and Natália pause at the name Castorina Augusto Rodrigues and wonder what anyone can really learn from a sign. Maybe nothing. Still, the name has already picked up a charge before the story properly begins. Ivan takes his time with it. He says the question stuck with him, then sends the episode back into the past because that is the only clean way in. Interview tape carries the next stretch. A guest talks through school, family expectations, teaching, and a life that kept changing direction. A missed test matters. So does teaching at Beethoven's House, moving from letters toward biology, and landing on an honor board. The military college part feels tense: there are friends there, but also a place described as narrow, hierarchical, and hard to fully live inside. Biology arrives almost sideways. After that come the library, English learned alone, and ecology and evolution found through books rather than a tidy institutional route. The episode stays patient, sometimes almost stubbornly so. Ivan does not announce the case in bold strokes. He lets place, education, memory, and biography gather around the street name until it starts to feel less ornamental and more pointed. The reporting structure shows up in the credits too: archive research, legal research in Foz do Iguaçu, editing, music, transcripts, an encyclopedia, website work, and season art. By the end, the pieces still do not resolve. That is the point of the opening frame: a sign, a remembered life, and a question with room to trouble the listener for a while.

As heard by us

A patient season opener turns a Curitiba street sign into the first clue of a larger human story.

Projeto Humanos begins season seven in Curitiba, with Ivan Mizanzuki standing beside Natalia at a street sign bearing the name Castorina Augusto Rodrigues.

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