The Day I Met You

Andre Novais Oliveira's 2024 Brazilian film follows Zeca, who works as a librarian at a school in the neighbouring town. He has to get up early each morning to catch the bus, and it keeps getting harder; something prevents him from holding to the routine. Then he meets Louisa. The film stays at the small scale of daily life. A bus journey, the library, a house; there is almost no plot. That is Novais Oliveira's method: showing ordinary moments without cutting away, and building the bond between characters from time spent together rather than from talk. The director comes from an independent collective working around Belo Horizonte, and some of the performers are members of his own family. That gives the scenes a naturalness far from film acting. The ending is left open, deliberately. Who it's for: those who like slow, observational Brazilian cinema and quiet love stories. Who it's not for: viewers waiting for incident and development; the whole film is made of small moments.