Hard Labor

Hard Labor (Trabalhar Cansa), directed by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra, is a Brazilian film about a woman who opens her own grocery store after her husband loses his job, only to discover the store has a dark past and is plagued by increasingly strange occurrences. The film blends social realism with atmospheric horror to portray a middle class Brazilian family's economic crisis. It had its world premiere in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival and won Best Screenplay at the Havana Film Festival New York. Who it's for: anyone curious about a Brazilian horror-drama, shown at Cannes, that interweaves a family's economic collapse with increasingly strange events at a newly opened grocery store. Who it's not for: those wanting a clear, fully explained horror story, since the film deliberately blends social realism with atmospheric ambiguity.