Katasia Filmes

André, a teenager, lives in an industrial town in Brazil near an old aluminum factory. One day, a factory worker, Cristiano, suffers an accident. Asked to go to Cristiano’s house to pick up clothes and documents, André stumbles on a notebook, and it’s here that Araby begins — or, rather, transforms. As André reads from the journal entries, we are plunged into Cristiano’s life, into stories of his wanderings, adventures, and loves.

Living in a temporary autonomous zone, the residents spend their days dealing with small lunatic plots, quixotesque farces and rimbaudian delusions.

In Miguel Burnier, a small, deserted town in Minas Gerais, Brazil, a few remaining inhabitants have been trying since 2005 to survive the purchase of their land by a mining giant. Tormented by unemployment, isolation and alcoholism, they try their best to keep their community together and to breathe new life into this village where the world seems to have collapsed.

The gun pointed at the head is a delirium that expands into disorderly controlled chaos. “He Who Saw the Abyss” by Gregorio Gananian and Negro Leo, is like a car that enters the curve at 300km/h, but slowly. In an experimental whirlwind, moving between a noisy sound and an almost idyllic musicality, the film is structured out of a pile of images that seem as intimate as they are delirious, accelerating into a trance that is fragmented by a montage, signed by João Dumans and Gregorio Gananian, who strive to articulate an intense experience on the big screen.

A tale of love and death in a world where the state of exception has become the rule and the last days of humanity never end.

The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble – not for the sake of rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.

In an old, dilapidated mansion in downtown São Paulo, an old Shakespearean actor exiled from the stage lives with his ghosts. In his bed, surrounded by red curtains taken from an abandoned theater, he dreams of the plague and fire spreading throughout the country. A strange community forms around the old actor.