By Mike Collett-White

BERLIN, Feb 9 (Reuters) - Brazilian Cao Hamburger, whose film looks at his country's dark past, is the latest director to describe the brutality of South America's military dictatorships through the eyes of a child.

"The Year My Parents Went on Vacation" centres around a 12-year-old boy whose parents leave him at his grandfather's doorstep as they frantically seek to escape political arrest, which could mean imprisonment, exile, torture or death.

He is ordered to tell anyone who asks that his mother and father have gone on "vacation", a euphemism meaning they are hiding from the military regime.

The movie, in the main competition at the Berlin film festival this year, is set in 1970 during Brazil's military dictatorship, and uses the country's victorious soccer World Cup campaign as a backdrop.

It follows films "Machuca", about how two boys' lives are changed by the military coup of Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973, and "Kamchatka", about a boy who sees the effects of Argentina's dictatorship on his family in the 1970s.

"They were all made at about the same time, and without intending it we see the emergence of a kind of trilogy of films," Hamburger told reporters on Friday.

"I think we (the directors) felt a need to talk about this period in our countries ... and we all chose the approach of looking at it through the eyes of a child.

"I always think it's good that people don't forget what went wrong in the past, to make sure these things are not repeated," he added through a translator.

South American cinema generally has taken a long, hard look at the reality of life there in recent years, with movies like the acclaimed "City of God", set in the violent slums of Rio de Janeiro, and "Carandiru", about a prison massacre in Sao Paulo.

At the Cannes film festival last year, Uruguayan director Israel Adrian Caetano's "Buenos Aires 1977" told the true story of four men who attempted to escape a safe house where they were tortured by special squads cracking down on left-wing activists.

PELE, POLITICAL REPRESSION

Hamburger said his was more than just a political film, and told the universal tales of communication across generations, young friendship and the possibility of tolerance between different faiths and cultures.

Mauro, the boy at the centre of the narrative, is adopted by an old Jew in the Bom Retiro district of Sao Paulo after his grandfather dies and befriended by a group of local youths.

Italians, Brazilians and Jews are united by soccer, and gather around television sets to follow the fortunes of Pele and his teammates playing in the World Cup in Mexico.

"In our country, football can be called the opium of the people," Hamburger said. "In Brazil, football is stronger than the government. Football is a passion shared by everyone."

Despite Mauro's joy at his team's victories, he sits for hours staring at the telephone, hoping his parents will call to tell him they are coming back.

At one point he looks on as a university is raided by police who arrest and detain students they suspect of Communist sympathies, while a student leader he befriends shows up at his apartment badly beaten.

Hamburger's trip to Berlin has a personal resonance, because his father was a German Jew born in the city.

He said that after the fall of the wall dividing east and west Berlin in 1989, his family received a letter from the German government saying that land confiscated from them by the Nazis, and later taken by the Communists, would be returned.

"I have yet to see the plot of land myself, but I will take a look while I'm here," he said.

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