Araby

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.

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.

"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.

After my wife and I finished watching this we tuned into an Italian cooking show. Although my wife and I do not understand Italian it was much better than this film.

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...