INTERVIEW: ‘Araby’ heads to the road to showcase Brazilian workers
Photo: Aristides de Sousa stars in Affonso Uchôa and João Dumans’ Araby. Photo courtesy of Grasshopper Film / Provided with permission.
The new Brazilian film Araby, from directors Affonso Uchôa and João Dumans, follows many paths and adventures as it tells an allegorical tale about Brazil and the country’s workers. The movie, which has been a hit on the festival circuit, will premiere June 22 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.
Araby tells the story of André (Murilo Caliari), a young man who lives in an industrial city in southern Brazil. He takes care of his brother and has a sad view out of his bedroom to the smoking and gurgling factories in the distance. His life changes when he’s asked to help Cristiano (Aristides de Sousa), a factory worker who has been injured. When picking up Cristiano’s clothes and documents, André finds a journal and learns of Cristiano’s many journeys. This discovery plunges the film into a road trip across Brazil and across time.
Dumans and Uchôa worked on the film after their first collaboration, The Hidden Tiger, and they have won praise for both efforts, which are infused with authenticity and lyrical poetry.
“Araby has lots of origins,” Dumans said in a recent phone interview. “There’s not a single influence but a series of events and things that we were living that came together during some years, and then we were building this film from these different influences.”
Although there were many influences behind Araby, two instantly come to mind for Dumans. First off, de Sousa is an actor that the filmmakers know well. He was featured in The Hidden Tiger, and his talents impressed them so much that they wrote Cristiano specifically for him.
“This film called The Hidden Tiger is where Aristides de Sousa, the actor of Araby, appears for the first time,” Dumans said. “We wrote the film thinking about him, thinking about things that he lived in his life and everything, so I think this was a major influence, even though the film is not about his life. It’s a fiction, of course, but we were very inspired by him.”
The other influence involves Dumans’ and Uchôa’s respective upbringings and how they might inform the viewer about the current state of labor in Brazil, a picture that is not always positive. Dumans is from Ouro Preto, Brazil, while Uchôa lives in his hometown of Contagem. Araby, not coincidentally, begins in Contagem and ends on Ouro Preto.
“These two places are very important for us,” Dumans said. “Contagem is an industrial city, a more modern city on the periphery of Belo Horizonte, and Ouro Preto is an ancient city, colonial city from the time that the Portuguese used to take gold from Brazil. And then we arrived at this village, this neighborhood for the workers in Ouro Preto, and knowing that neighborhood was very important for us because lots of questions that we had about work in Brazil and the role of work in our country. That was very important for us arriving to that place because that neighborhood … was like a synthesis of lots of contradictions that we could find in our country, so we decided to create the film there. So I would say these are the two major influences — I think Aristides himself as someone we knew, and the cities and this workers’ neighborhood where we started working and researching.”
The writing process between Dumans and Uchôa is quite unique. Because Araby features a lot of voiceover work, some of the writing could be accomplished at the editing stage. This meant that the filmmakers were writing before production, during production and even in post-production.
“We think the whole process of the film is actually a writing process because we have a huge voiceover of the film,” Uchôa said. “We ended the voiceover just on the last months of the editing process. We write and rewrite the voiceover during the whole editing and during the film process as well, and so we write the film during the whole process. … I start to write something, and so I pass it to João. João makes some notes, makes some adaptations, makes some changes, and then the scene comes back to me. And I make other adaptations in the process. Mainly our creations — scenes, dialogues, voiceovers, everything — was just like that. … The other is always contributing in the other’s idea during the whole process.”
Although Araby is a road trip movie, the film was not influenced by the cinematic genre. Instead, the directors were more impacted by literature and one movie that wouldn’t be classified as a road trip film.
“I don’t remember us talking in special about any road movie as a direct influence,” Dumans said. “Actually we would be much more influenced by films that are only happening in one place, for example, like The Last Picture Show from [director Peter] Bogdanovich. It’s not a road movie, but the sense of the community, of the characters, of … the day by day of the characters — you know what I mean — this micro-universe of the lives and also the universe of this decadence in the city.”
Another contributing influence was the reality of Brazil where the workers in the factories face uncertain futures and difficult lives. These real lives helped them write the script.
“These workers that go to different places are very common,” Dumans said. “That’s very common in Brazil that you have these workers, and we lived a moment where you couldn’t find work in Brazil because of the economical development. So you started working somewhere, and then the work ended. And then you go somewhere else.”
Uchôa said the road aspects were actually secondary to the characters and their lives.
“I think we reached the road because of the characters, because of the universe that we are working with,” Uchôa said. “We just came there because of the characters, because of Aristides, because of the life of the people like Aristides that we noticed. These people have a very, very strong desire to know the world, to know different places, to live different experiences.”
This was a crucial combination for Dumans and Uchôa. They wanted a character who was facing oppression and difficulty finding work, but at the same time, the central character needs to feel compelled to know and see the world, thus driving him to the road. The trip that Cristiano takes is one of simultaneous necessity and wonderment.
“We talked about The Hidden Tiger film as well,” Uchôa said. “It’s a very close [movie], a film very set in just one place, just one neighborhood. We thought it would be a good thing to put those characters, to put someone that lived those lives, a marginalized life, in the world, to feel and experience different things. … It was a very great adventure, and so for us, it was good to try to portray a life of people like Aristides’ people, like Cristiano, in a sense of adventure, in a sense of a very big story. And for us, the road helped us to build the story.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Araby will open June 22 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City. Click here for more information.
