João Dumans & Affonso Uchoa | 2017 | Brazil | 97'

Andre is a young boy that lives in an industrial neighborhood in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, near an old aluminium factory. One day, he finds by chance a mysterious notebook, which he starts to read. As a fairytale, the film divides itself, and plunges into the life of the notebook owner. What we see and listen from this point on is the epic story of a worker whose happiness and sufferings reveal from another point of view the story of Brazilian social and economical development in the last ten years.

In Araby the directors portray labor and poverty from a different perspective than the usual Brazilian melodrama tendency. Born of a literary story and crossed by a theatrical impulse, the film shows the ordinary life of a worker in an inventive way, undaunted by the harshness and violence of the Brazilian reality.


”A quiet epic which is both ideal for the current turbulent epoch and timeless, grittily specific in its details but universal in its themes, Joao Dumans and Affonso Uchoa’s Brazilian wonder Araby (Arabia) sets a high bar for world cinema of 2017. An intriguingly structured, multilayered road movie in which an ordinary working-class dude looks back over a nation-wandering decade of his life, this second collaboration by the writer-directors is a cumulatively engrossing and ultimately very moving work of clear-eyed political intent.” – Neil Young, Hollywood Reporter