Shelf Stories: Pedroca dos Filmes

Pedro owns Shaun of the Dead twice.

Not the way I once owned two identical copies of Molly's Game, which is to say by accident, discovered years later with mild embarrassment. Pedro's two copies are on purpose. There is the "Reel Heroes" Blu-ray edition, because Shaun of the Dead is his favourite film of all time and that is the edition you want. And next to it there is the Brazilian DVD release, which is genuinely rare where he lives.

Same film. Two completely different objects, with two different stories about how they ended up on the shelf. If that distinction makes immediate sense to you, this post is for you.

This is the first in a series about the collectors who keep their shelves on Arkiv. It starts in Brazil.

The instinct comes first

Pedro goes by Pedroca dos Filmes, and his collection is a little over 200 movies, plus box sets and TV show volumes, mostly SpongeBob, a detail I am contractually unable to leave out. He has been collecting films for three or four years, but the instinct is older than that: he was buying music DVDs long before the movies started, because, in his words, he has always loved owning things himself.

I think about that phrasing a lot. Not owning things. Owning things himself. The copy that is yours, on your shelf, that nobody can revoke or re-license or quietly remove from a server. Every collector I have ever talked to has some version of that sentence in them.

The shelf lived in two places

Before Arkiv, Pedro's collection lived where a lot of collections live: split down the middle. The shelf itself was catalogued in EMDB, a desktop program, and the watching happened on Letterboxd. Two systems, two logins, and the thing that makes a collection a collection, the link between the object you own and the nights you spent with it, lived in neither.

I have written before about why Letterboxd is not your shelf. Pedro was living it: the films he owned in one database, the films he watched in another, and a manual sync job in between that fell to whoever had the energy that week, which is to say, occasionally nobody.

A post I didn't write

Pedro found Arkiv through a post on a subreddit for Brazilian movie collectors. Someone had written that there was finally a good, free site for cataloguing a collection. He read it, decided to try adding his collection, and kept going until everything was in.

I didn't write that post. Another collector did: someone who had himself found Arkiv through a post on Reddit, and then decided, without anyone asking him to, to tell the Brazilian collecting communities what he'd found. So the chain runs stranger to stranger to stranger before it ever reaches me, and that, honestly, is my favourite thing about how this community is growing: in waves, by word of mouth, one collector vouching to the next, from places I have never been. The collections arriving lately span everything from a dozen discs to one collector who added 511 in a single day. Pedro's two hundred and change sits somewhere in the middle by count.

By care, it might be first.

The ritual

Here is what happens when a new movie arrives at Pedro's place. It gets added to his collection right away, before it settles onto the shelf: the condition it arrived in, where he bought it. Then, whenever he watches a DVD or Blu-ray he owns, he logs it with a rating and a review, partly to keep a record of the viewing and partly so he knows exactly how long it has been since he last saw it.

He has written more than a hundred reviews. Nobody on the platform has written more. Not me, and I built the thing.

When I asked what almost stopped him early on, what frustrated him about the site, his answer was that hardly anything had. I am having that sentence framed.

What four years looks like

When I asked what he had enjoyed most, Pedro didn't name the cataloguing. He named the stats: watching the collection grow across the years, seeing which distributors keep showing up on his shelf. A collection accumulates quietly, one purchase at a time, and then one day a chart shows you what you have actually been doing for four years. Pedro is the kind of collector who wants to see that chart.

Here is the part I find satisfying, as the person who builds these pages. Pedro's ritual is exactly what makes his charts worth looking at. Because he records the condition of every disc and where he bought it, his stats fill in the charts most collections leave blank: condition, where things were acquired, purchases by year. His growth graph is really a graph of four years of decisions. The distributor chart is the shape of his taste, told through the logos on his spines. None of it is data he sat down to enter for its own sake. It is just the residue of paying attention, drawn back for him in charts.

The reviews compound the same way. Somewhere past his hundredth review, Arkiv quietly handed Pedro a badge called Critic, and as far as I can tell he is the first collector to earn it. He is also about fifty discs short of the one called Archivist, which unlocks at 250, and I suspect he is going to treat that number as a shopping list.

And because every disc, watch, and review he logs carries a date, there is a page called Chronicle that reads his collection back to him as a story: the first item, the milestones as the shelf crossed each threshold, the first review, the point where his taste shifted enough that his collector archetype shifted with it. Most collections have a history. Pedro's has a biography, and he wrote it one disc at a time without ever sitting down to write anything.

The wishlist

I asked Pedro what was missing, and his answer sent me right back to the top of this post. He wants to record the country of origin of an edition, and the packaging type: Digipack, Steelbook, and the rest.

Of course he does. A man who owns the Reel Heroes Blu-ray and the rare Brazilian DVD of the same film does not have two entries for one movie. He has two editions, and editions have nationalities, packaging, and stories. The request and the crown jewel are the same instinct.

The country one embarrasses me a little, because I never thought of it, and I know exactly why. I only ever buy discs for my own region. My shelf has never needed a country column, so the platform never grew one. For Pedro, collecting across regions is just how collecting works: the rare Brazilian DVD at the top of this post is not a novelty on his shelf, it is the point of his shelf. One answer from one collector, and a blind spot I did not know I had was suddenly visible.

The packaging request got me a different way. When I built the edition field, I thought of a Steelbook as a kind of edition, something you would type into the freeform text and move on. Pedro is right, and I was wrong. The edition is what is on the disc. The packaging is the object in your hands, and collectors hunt, choose, and pay premiums for the object. A text field flattens two things collectors genuinely care about into one.

This is why these interviews matter to me more than any chart I look at. Left to myself, I would build a platform that works perfectly for my own experience of collecting and quietly misses everyone whose shelf works differently. The nuances of this hobby live in other people's collections, not mine. The only way to capture them is to ask, and then to listen when a collector in Brazil politely points at two things you got wrong. Both are on the list now, and I mean that literally: I stopped halfway through writing this post to create the two roadmap items, and each one has Pedro's name on it.

He would also like to set a custom image as his collection's background. Having now seen photos of his shelves, I understand completely.

Care over count

Two hundred films is not a headline number. You will find bigger collections on Arkiv, and much bigger ones out in the wild. But every one of Pedro's two hundred checked in the same way: condition noted, origin recorded, watches logged, reviews written.

A collection is a record of what you own. A cared-for collection is a record of attention. Pedro's shelf is the second kind, and it is the kind I built this for.

Arkiv is the platform where Pedro keeps his collection. It's free, built by a collector, and there are some fun things to uncover as your collection grows. If your shelf has stories on it too, you can start yours here. Cataloguing on something else and thinking about moving? Here's an honest comparison if CLZ Movies is what you're weighing it against.