The Brazilian film Arábia, by Affonso Uchoa and João Dumans, was announced as the winner of the main award for Best Latin American Film of the Year at the 8th Annual Cinema Tropical Awards, announced at a special event at The New York Times Company headquarters.
The film highlights the story of André, a boy living in an industrial neighborhood in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, near an old aluminum factory. Once a week, his aunt Márcia, a volunteer nurse at the community hospital, visits him along with his younger brother to help them with household chores while their mother is away.
One day, one of the factory workers, Cristiano, a foreigner with a troubled past in the neighborhood, suffers an accident at the factory. Márcia provides first aid right in front of the factory and asks André to go to Cristiano’s house to get his documents and some clothes. Upon arriving there, André accidentally finds a mysterious notebook, which he begins to read. André discovers that Cristiano started writing this notebook for the factory’s theater group, where these workers were invited to write something about their lives. But Cristiano couldn’t stop writing. Like a fairy tale, the film splits and dives into Cristiano’s life. And what we see and hear from that point on is the epic story of this man’s life — the life of a worker whose joys and sufferings reveal, from another perspective, the story of Brazil’s social and economic development over the past ten years.
The non-profit media arts organization Cinema Tropical also announced that the audience in New York will have the opportunity to see the winning and nominated films, which will be screened as part of the Cinema Tropical Festival, from February 2 to 4, 2018, at the Museum of the Moving Image.
Based in New York, Cinema Tropical (CT) is the leading promoter of Latin American cinema in the U.S. Founded by Carlos A. Gutiérrez and Monika Wagenberg in 2001, with the mission of distributing, programming, and promoting what would become the largest boom in Latin American cinema in decades, CT has brought to American audiences some of the first screenings of films like Amores Perros and Y Tu Mamá También.
The Cinema Tropical Awards were created in 2010 to honor excellence in the making of Latin American films, being the only international award entirely dedicated to recognizing the art of recent Latin American cinema.