ARABIA

Andre is a young boy that lives in an industrial neighborhood in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, near an old aluminum factory. Once a week, his aunt Márcia, a voluntary nurse at the community hospital, visits him and his younger brother to help them with the domestic tasks, while their mother is away.

One day, one of the factory workers, Cristiano, a foreigner with a turbulent background in the neighborhood, suffers an accident at the factory. Márcia gives him first aid right in front of the factory, and asks André to go to Cristiano’s house to get his documents and some clothes. When André arrives there, he finds by chance a mysterious notebook, which he starts to read.

André discovers that Cristiano started writing this notebook for the factory’s theater group, where these workers were asked to write down something about their lives. But Cristiano couldn’t stop writing. As a fairy tale, the film divides itself, and plunges into Cristiano’s life. And what we see and listen from this point on is the epic story of the latter’s life – a worker’s life whose happiness and sufferings reveal from another point of view the story of Brazilian social and economic development in the last ten years.