One night seven years ago, Rafael came home after work and discovered that people he did not know had come looking for him. He immediately fled, without looking back. From that moment on, his life changed, as if that night had never ended. One evening, around an improvised fire near a factory, he decides to confide his journey to a stranger. Rafael’s intimate account meets the collective testimony of an entire nation oppressed by poverty, police repression and institutional corruption.

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.

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.