Zeca tries to get up early to catch the bus and arrive an hour and a half later at the neighboring town’s school, where he works as a librarian. Waking up early is evermore difficult: something prevents him from maintaining his routine. One day, Zeca meets Louisa.
Maria José Novais Oliveira, a black woman, resident on the outskirts of Contagem, already in her 60s, has become a film actress, with an award-winning career in Brazil and internationally. This documentary recalls the image of a unique woman who marked Brazilian cinema in the 2010s.
In 2011, during a blackout in an outskirt neighborhood’s street, a family – surrounded by candles that light conversations and thoughts – awaits the return of electricity. Now, ten years later, the light tries to impose its place towards the shadows of memory.
Down on his luck and recently divorced, Paulo has begun driving a cab around Rio, hoping he’ll make enough to send his ex money to support their ten-year-old son. He mostly works nights, so in addition to his encounters with a colourful variety of customers, colleagues, cops and others, he must cope with loneliness, fatigue and new faces in his life.
In order to take a new job as an employee in the public sanitation department, Juliana moves from the inner city of Itaúna to the metropolitan town of Contagem in Brazil. While waiting for her husband to join her, she adapts to her new life, meeting people and discovering new horizons, trying to overcome her past.
With its obvious simplicity, the film’s title happens to set the mood of the film, or at least its guiding principle: staying anchored in everyday life. More precisely, the life of Maria José and Norberto, who have been married for 35 years and who live in Contagem, in the suburbs of Belo Horizonte. Their marriage is on the rocks, which leads their two sons to also wonder about the future of their own relationships with their wives. The story is quite ordinary. How can one capture such an impercep- tible shift in the heart of the banality of things, only made more noticeable by a crisis? Filming his own family, his own parents, his brother and himself, André Novais Oliveira has chosen to take his time. He shots long sequences, leaving enough time for the fictional situations on which he puts his characters to grow and unfold. Then he uses wide frames to linger on more mundane, concrete or at times farcical moments: eating an orange, cooking, watching television...