I just saw this film yesterday in Lisbon, where it had won the Jury Prize at Indielisboa. I knew nothing about it except for the fact it was Brazilian, and I had lived in Brazil for eight years, so went to see it with my Brazilian partner. We both loved it. It was a extremely sad film overall but had moments of great humour and of great tenderness. Some people have criticized it for not being "political" enough but it was all the more moving for focusing on the personal rather than on slogans. For those of us who know Brazil it comes over as really authentic. The dialogue is spot-on. Recommended for anyone who likes thoughtful cinema.
11 Reviews
A working class laborer moves down the road
Red-1259 October 2018
The Brazilian film Arábia (2017) was shown in the U.S. with the translated title Araby. The movie was co-written and co-directed by João Dumans and
Affonso Uchoa.
The film stars Aristides de Sousa as Cristiano, a working class man who has to settle for jobs involving unskilled labor. He travels down the road, always looking for a better job and a better life.
This film had some real strengths. It demonstrated the fate of an unskilled laborer who can never find a job has any meaning or gives him any satisfaction. de Sousa is a fine actor, and he makes his role come alive.
I found the movie discouraging, because Cristiano never attempts to improve his situation in any way. He talks about how his father organized a strike among fruit pickers, but he himself doesn't organize. He's likable enough, and he makes friends, but when he move on, he leaves them behind.
A previous reviewer called this a "A movie about hope," but I would call it "A movie without hope."
We saw this film at Rochester's wonderful Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman Museum. It was part of the excellent Rochester Labor Film Series. It will work well on the small screen.
The film stars Aristides de Sousa as Cristiano, a working class man who has to settle for jobs involving unskilled labor. He travels down the road, always looking for a better job and a better life.
This film had some real strengths. It demonstrated the fate of an unskilled laborer who can never find a job has any meaning or gives him any satisfaction. de Sousa is a fine actor, and he makes his role come alive.
I found the movie discouraging, because Cristiano never attempts to improve his situation in any way. He talks about how his father organized a strike among fruit pickers, but he himself doesn't organize. He's likable enough, and he makes friends, but when he move on, he leaves them behind.
A previous reviewer called this a "A movie about hope," but I would call it "A movie without hope."
We saw this film at Rochester's wonderful Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman Museum. It was part of the excellent Rochester Labor Film Series. It will work well on the small screen.
Bordering on boring with a few interesting moments. Keeps your attention nevertheless due to the variety in scenery and people we meet
JvH486 February 2017
Saw this at the Rotterdam film festival (iffr.com) 2017, where it was part of the Tiger Competition. Similar to 2016, again the nominations for the Tiger Award were confined to only eight movies, so being part of the happy few rises expectations. The movie itself has the format of a road movie, but that would be a misnomer. Actually we see an endless series of jobs, places, people he met or worked with, and so on and so forth. There is no development of any kind, just a seemingly infinite sequence. It portrays the lives of the workers there and their low-end jobs with low (or none, sometimes) payment. Everything is centered around one man: Christiano, who wrote it all down in a diary for 20 years.
The net result is mildly interesting because of the variety in locations, work places and situations. There were a few pivotal moments, however, for example when people talked about the late Bareet (sp?) who was good in organizing workers into a strike and thus successfully forced better payments. A second example was his short relationship with Ana, that prematurely ended but continued on a distance by exchanging letters. But that is all there is. I wrongly assumed beforehand that the diary would expose the dangers faced by workers in the factory, causing the hospitalization of Christiana that we see in the opening scene. But there was no such indictment against employers, although we see ample instances where laborers do have to work in questionable circumstances.
The movie borders on boring due to the very calm passage of scenes, yet keeps you awake for the complete running time because of the diversity of said scenes. Each on itself was powerful enough to stand on its own feet and to make clear what was going on. The role of young man Andre is minimal, and only important in the first 10 minutes when he is sent to collect some clothes and an ID after Christiano is hospitalized, in whose house he finds a diary spanning 30 years. From that moment on, the story rewinds to the moment when Christiano started to take notes. The story is told by a voice-over intermixed with played fragments, all of which feature Christiano but each time having other co-players and a different location as tapestry.
The net result is mildly interesting because of the variety in locations, work places and situations. There were a few pivotal moments, however, for example when people talked about the late Bareet (sp?) who was good in organizing workers into a strike and thus successfully forced better payments. A second example was his short relationship with Ana, that prematurely ended but continued on a distance by exchanging letters. But that is all there is. I wrongly assumed beforehand that the diary would expose the dangers faced by workers in the factory, causing the hospitalization of Christiana that we see in the opening scene. But there was no such indictment against employers, although we see ample instances where laborers do have to work in questionable circumstances.
The movie borders on boring due to the very calm passage of scenes, yet keeps you awake for the complete running time because of the diversity of said scenes. Each on itself was powerful enough to stand on its own feet and to make clear what was going on. The role of young man Andre is minimal, and only important in the first 10 minutes when he is sent to collect some clothes and an ID after Christiano is hospitalized, in whose house he finds a diary spanning 30 years. From that moment on, the story rewinds to the moment when Christiano started to take notes. The story is told by a voice-over intermixed with played fragments, all of which feature Christiano but each time having other co-players and a different location as tapestry.
'In the end, all we have is what we remember'...
Xstal21 April 2020
An incredibly beautiful and contemplative reflection about life, a life - how its unpredictable nature, with the consequences of the cards we're dealt, with the choices we make, takes us to places we could never have imagined or anticipated and the people we meet on that journey. Art, poetry and cinema conjoined, this is a film from Brazil that will remain with you for as long as you care to remember but well worth revisiting if you start to forget, for no other reason than to remind you how you got here and to where you might be going.
Intimate and Poetic
howard.schumann22 April 2019
According to Yann Martel, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel "Life of Pi," "stories are important because everything is in how we perceive it and nothing is really real until we say it is." The story told in Brazilian directors João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa's ("The Hidden Tiger") intimate and poetic Araby (Arábia) may not be "important" in the usual sense of the word, but it is a very real and universal one. The film chronicles the personal struggle of Cristiano (Aristides de Sousa, "The Hidden Tiger"), a factory worker in Ouro Preto, Brazil in the state of Minas Gerais, as he tries to redeem his life from a poor choice he made when he was younger.
Its title taken from a James Joyce story in "Dubliners" and reinforced by a joke told by a co-worker, the film opens as André (Murilo Caliari), a teenage boy living with his younger brother near an old aluminum factory, rides his bike down a lonely country road to the sound of Jackson C. Frank's beautiful 1960s song "Blues Run the Game," a cry from a similar traveler who lost his way. Looked after by their aunt Márcia (Gláucia Vandeveld, "Subybaya") while the boys' parents are "traveling," André is told to collect Cristiano's belongings and bring them to the hospital after he collapsed on the job. It is here that that Araby begins again, reconstituting itself as a road movie.
As narrated by de Sousa from the diary that André discovers among his possessions, Cristiano describes the one year, four months, and twenty-six days he spent in jail as a result of a car theft and his subsequent time on the road in small towns in Southeastern Brazil looking for odd jobs to stay alive. "I'm like everyone else," he writes, "just that my life was a little bit different. It's hard to choose something to tell," he says, "because in the end all we have are memories of what we went through." What Cristiano remembers constitutes the core of the film: The people he meets on the road, his political awakening, and his love affair with Ana (Renata Cabral), a secretary at a textile factory where he worked. "Everyone had a story," he writes, "Even the quiet ones."
There are no dramatic peaks and valleys but brief, poignant stories - vignettes that shed light on the daily experience of millions of laborers all over the world. The stories are punctuated by exquisite Brazilian, Tunisian, and American folk songs such as those of Brazilian composer Renato Teixeira, Tunisian musician Anouar Brahem, and Frank's "Blues Run the Game," which we hear more than once in the film. In his journal, Cristiano describes his work as a tangerine picker, handyman at a brothel, paver, trucker, and worker at a steel mill, all depicted with a dreamlike quality in which everything is understated, bordering on the surreal.
Even an incident where his truck runs over someone or something walking on the road late at night is murky and unclear. We hear a thump and then see Cristiano, fearful of going back to prison, burying something in the ground. Although there is variety in the circumstances of the people Cristiano meets along the way, they are bound together by a feeling of alienation and a search for "home." There are some good times, however - banter with friends, tall tales true or invented, card games, and the songs that hide the blues. One of the focal points of the film is Cristiano's relationship with Ana which, like many of his experiences, begins promisingly but ends unhappily after Ana's miscarriage and their realization of how different they are.
A chance meeting on a tangerine plantation with an aging man named Barreto (José Maria Amorim) stirs Cristiano's political awareness as he learns that the old man was once a labor organizer who fought for workers' rights. "We sow so much, but reap so little," Cristiano says prophetically. Finding out that no one on the farm is being paid, he complains to his boss who tells him that he has no money to pay his workers and, as Cristiano quits, he takes some tangerines with him to sell or eat on the road. When he finds an outlet for self-discovery in a theater group and is told to write something important about his life, he begins to put into words what he has been unable to express verbally.
Though Araby reminds us of social-realist films by Italian neo-realists and those of Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, it is more a film about the human condition and of one person's search for release from mental, physical, and emotional adversity. While the release is hard to find, the film lends a sense of nobility to his quest. As Cristiano's mood darkens, however, and his "hard travelin" gets harder, he tells us that he feels "like an old, tired horse." Realizing that the anchor that he has looked for to shield him from the long loneliness has become more elusive and his desire for "home" has become acute, it is clear that the blues have run the game.
Its title taken from a James Joyce story in "Dubliners" and reinforced by a joke told by a co-worker, the film opens as André (Murilo Caliari), a teenage boy living with his younger brother near an old aluminum factory, rides his bike down a lonely country road to the sound of Jackson C. Frank's beautiful 1960s song "Blues Run the Game," a cry from a similar traveler who lost his way. Looked after by their aunt Márcia (Gláucia Vandeveld, "Subybaya") while the boys' parents are "traveling," André is told to collect Cristiano's belongings and bring them to the hospital after he collapsed on the job. It is here that that Araby begins again, reconstituting itself as a road movie.
As narrated by de Sousa from the diary that André discovers among his possessions, Cristiano describes the one year, four months, and twenty-six days he spent in jail as a result of a car theft and his subsequent time on the road in small towns in Southeastern Brazil looking for odd jobs to stay alive. "I'm like everyone else," he writes, "just that my life was a little bit different. It's hard to choose something to tell," he says, "because in the end all we have are memories of what we went through." What Cristiano remembers constitutes the core of the film: The people he meets on the road, his political awakening, and his love affair with Ana (Renata Cabral), a secretary at a textile factory where he worked. "Everyone had a story," he writes, "Even the quiet ones."
There are no dramatic peaks and valleys but brief, poignant stories - vignettes that shed light on the daily experience of millions of laborers all over the world. The stories are punctuated by exquisite Brazilian, Tunisian, and American folk songs such as those of Brazilian composer Renato Teixeira, Tunisian musician Anouar Brahem, and Frank's "Blues Run the Game," which we hear more than once in the film. In his journal, Cristiano describes his work as a tangerine picker, handyman at a brothel, paver, trucker, and worker at a steel mill, all depicted with a dreamlike quality in which everything is understated, bordering on the surreal.
Even an incident where his truck runs over someone or something walking on the road late at night is murky and unclear. We hear a thump and then see Cristiano, fearful of going back to prison, burying something in the ground. Although there is variety in the circumstances of the people Cristiano meets along the way, they are bound together by a feeling of alienation and a search for "home." There are some good times, however - banter with friends, tall tales true or invented, card games, and the songs that hide the blues. One of the focal points of the film is Cristiano's relationship with Ana which, like many of his experiences, begins promisingly but ends unhappily after Ana's miscarriage and their realization of how different they are.
A chance meeting on a tangerine plantation with an aging man named Barreto (José Maria Amorim) stirs Cristiano's political awareness as he learns that the old man was once a labor organizer who fought for workers' rights. "We sow so much, but reap so little," Cristiano says prophetically. Finding out that no one on the farm is being paid, he complains to his boss who tells him that he has no money to pay his workers and, as Cristiano quits, he takes some tangerines with him to sell or eat on the road. When he finds an outlet for self-discovery in a theater group and is told to write something important about his life, he begins to put into words what he has been unable to express verbally.
Though Araby reminds us of social-realist films by Italian neo-realists and those of Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, it is more a film about the human condition and of one person's search for release from mental, physical, and emotional adversity. While the release is hard to find, the film lends a sense of nobility to his quest. As Cristiano's mood darkens, however, and his "hard travelin" gets harder, he tells us that he feels "like an old, tired horse." Realizing that the anchor that he has looked for to shield him from the long loneliness has become more elusive and his desire for "home" has become acute, it is clear that the blues have run the game.
A movie about hope
mpelluci7 November 2017
Warning: Spoilers
It is a quiet movie, if one think about this big blockbusters with explosions and car racing in high speed in monstrous highways. It is a movie that leads the audience into reflections. To reflect about misery and how people fight it daily, to reflect about poverty, and again, how people overcome it day after day after day. And it is a movie that shows us that even the most suffered and miserable of people can look at the horizon with hope, can find love and e brave enough to invest in it, can move on with life even though everything is always taken from him. It seemed to me at first that Cristiano was just a guy with a horrible bad luck. But in the end of the movie I realized Cristiano was a man with an incredible faith in life, in love, in starting again, in finding himself in the middle of his daily misery, in the middle of the daily aggression and suffering of a country that has had his dreams crushed by corruption and violence. Cristiano says in the end: "I was still breathing", a metaphor for a whole country, we are still breathing, we are still alive and we will fight for our right to live a simple life, full of love and hope, full of friendship, full of simple pleasures, like singing with a friend in a tangerine farm. Another great point of the movie is that it shows a different version of Brazil, a version that might be strange to the international public: it shows the countryside. It shows a part of Brazil that is almost unknown, but that ironically is what composes the greatest part of the geographical territory of a continental country: the countryside. The simple, silent, humble people that work in farms, quarries, construction, factories. The international public knows the Brazil of parties and half naked women. The Brazil of soccer. But Brazil is much more than that. We are a complex place, struggling to find our path in such a big world. This movie shows in a simple way that Brazil is more than that, is so much more than that. Also, I think the character André has a crucial function in the plot: it is through his eyes that we see Cristiano's life. It is through his reading of Cristiano's diary that we are able to find out what happened to that quiet factory worker, and how he got there. Ouro Preto is a colonial style city in the state of Minas Gerais, where I grew up. This movie took me home. It made me laugh with the simplicity of the people of my state, it made me cry to see how abandoned and miserably alone some people are in this life. But above all, this movie made me realize that one of the biggest powers we humans have in our minds and that makes us keep fighting through life is what moved Cristiano on: hope. I think the Brazilian audience is going to be enchanted by this movie, and will recognize itself in many of the adventures of Cristiano. I also think the international audiences will have the opportunity to get to know another Brazil, diverse from what they think of the country. It is a great chance to learn more about Brazil. I feel sad that not everybody got that. But alas! The movie is great. Go see it!
Hauntingly Beautiful Film
JamieNoelDirector26 May 2019
I sat down to watch this film at a film festival a while back without any expectations.
It started off very low-key and the tone remains so throughout but narratively it builds and builds into an epic mosaic of working class Brazil. One of the most quietly political films I've seen and so much more powerful as a result of that quietness.
Charming, funny, angry and tragic, this film has stuck with me for a long time and I don't think I'll forget the experience.
A small journey by an into an unfriendly world that nonetheless brings wisdom.
JohnDeSando16 August 2018
"I'm like everyone else. It's just my life that was a little bit different." Cristiano (Aristides de Sousa)
As a road ramble and self-discovery story, Araby, set in Brazil, is more unassuming than most others. In fact it is nothing like the robust Motorcycle Diaries or Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001); it rather is a simple tale from a factory worker Cristiano's (Aristides de Sousa) notebook that tells of small adventures and small defeats, all in the name of trying to find himself in the daily grind of working for the man.
Truth be told, his story is "a little bit different" but not by much. Araby has a lyric beauty in its simplicity, a reverence for the small things of life like riding a bicycle or briefly falling in love, with dreams of having a child, a seeming impossibility in such poverty. This almost randomly episodic tale, told in voice-over by Cristiano as young Andre (Murilo Caliari) reads Cristiano's notes, holds secrets about a young man's dreams and not so subtle opinions about the dead end of factory work.
In fact, the meta theme of owners exploiting workers has more prominence than it seems because of its low key appearance in a few words and images of Cristiano toiling amidst the hellish flames of the steel factory, where a good black worker can be fired or a competent Latino can become dispirited just by the work.
As Cristiano says, this is" the story of how I stood up for myself." That insight is worth watching in a road picture like few others.
As a road ramble and self-discovery story, Araby, set in Brazil, is more unassuming than most others. In fact it is nothing like the robust Motorcycle Diaries or Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001); it rather is a simple tale from a factory worker Cristiano's (Aristides de Sousa) notebook that tells of small adventures and small defeats, all in the name of trying to find himself in the daily grind of working for the man.
Truth be told, his story is "a little bit different" but not by much. Araby has a lyric beauty in its simplicity, a reverence for the small things of life like riding a bicycle or briefly falling in love, with dreams of having a child, a seeming impossibility in such poverty. This almost randomly episodic tale, told in voice-over by Cristiano as young Andre (Murilo Caliari) reads Cristiano's notes, holds secrets about a young man's dreams and not so subtle opinions about the dead end of factory work.
In fact, the meta theme of owners exploiting workers has more prominence than it seems because of its low key appearance in a few words and images of Cristiano toiling amidst the hellish flames of the steel factory, where a good black worker can be fired or a competent Latino can become dispirited just by the work.
As Cristiano says, this is" the story of how I stood up for myself." That insight is worth watching in a road picture like few others.
Very cute, I love these independent films...
RosanaBotafogo16 October 2021
Very cute, I love these independent films, the day to day, the raw exposed routine, a sincere portrait, a slow pace, but nothing that negatively impacts, a simple script, well executed, nothing grand, but sensitive and poetic, sad , beautiful, full of stories... And the choice of soundtrack, stupendous, makes it hurt, the testimonials are so real and vivid...
Stark and Unappealing
MikeyB17939 October 2019
Reflective and Poignant
pc959 March 2019
Warning: Spoilers
(spoilers) Affonso Uchoa directs "Araby", a simple and reflective memoir of a Brazilian man during his life journey from what appears to be young adulthood follies to middle-aged stifling work. The story is well told and deftly handled from changing different characters frames of reference in the beginning to fade out of flickering flame-light in the end. I especially liked listening to the narration to fill-in many of the motivations, memories, and thoughts of the poor fellow. His plight must be similar to many trying to make ends meet the world over, and shows how difficult it could be to be mostly alone in the world - but yet there are always people who can lend a hand a or make a difference in bad times. 8/10 and better than many movies these days.
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